The main challenge of being a History teacher in a neighbourhood school is that many people regard History as unimportant. An Express study once asked me, when she learned that I had majored in History, why I did not study something more practical.
Another challenge of being a History teacher is how to make events that happened many decades or even centuries ago real to kids. The famous Taiwanese historian/writer Lee Ao (李敖） said that a good historian can make a 死马 become 天马行空.
A dead horse can be described as a horse flying in the sky!
Because the events in the textbook are so distant from their life, many students find it hard to relate not to mention study history.
There was one year, this girl wrote a prelim essay about Stalin but all the names were Hitler. In the student’s mind, they were interchangeable!
I asked a senior teacher how to grade this. The student had memorised the correct facts but wrote the wrong name everywhere. I was advised to fail the student.