Jack Nicholson's Trash

My experience as a teacher in Russia officially began yesterday. I had two classes in a branch of our school a few metro stops from here. The first was a short class with two 10-year-old boys, who were remarkably well-behaved but not terribly well-focused.

My other class consisted of teenagers at the pre-intermediate level. The lesson in the book used as a hook a story about paparazzi going through Jack Nicholson's trash. Where the editors of our textbook got this from (much less, where they got permission to use Jack Nicholson's name), I don't know. The lesson aim was to practice quantifying terms like much, many, and a lot of with countable and uncountable nouns.

In the course of a bit over two hours together, I found out a few things about Russians. First, I discovered that Russians aren't really interested in things like Jack Nicholson's trash. My students seemed to understand the concept of the paparazzi but didn't think the kinds of things they cover are of much interest to Russians, who they claimed do not have the time to worry about such trivia.

I also discovered that Russians have an avid interest in Texas. From what they told me, I gather that Western films have been shown quite a lot in Russia, and the Russians seem to be under the impression that they are all set in Texas. I guess my Texas fixation of a couple months ago was fortuitous--I'll have good material to use!