ABSTRACT
In my thirty-plus years of teaching world history at the high school level and nine years of developing the next generation of world history teachers at the graduate school level, I have observed that new teachers tend to ask the same basic conceptual questions about the field. One of the main reasons for this is that history departments in our country generally do not emphasize world history in their course offerings, yet many of their graduates will be assigned to teach world history in their first appointment as secondary social studies teachers. Thus, the new teachers are taking on the responsibility to teach a subject that they are not prepared to teach well.
