Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this, but I need some help. I'm a new teacher and I am going to be teaching world history (high school).
My knowledge of Latin American / U.S. / European history is solid. Middle Eastern isn't as good as it could be for about 1100 A.D. - 1700 A.D., but it is serviceable. As for African and Asian history, my understanding is mostly Eurocentric, i.e., I'm familiar with most events from colonialism onwards. The same can be said for Latin American history, but to a lesser extent (and, from what I can tell, our information pre-colonialism is much more sketchy).
Essentially I am looking for resources for African / Asian history. The quicker, the better, but I understand there is only so much summation that can be done.
I really want to be able to do justice to world history but I worry that my education up to this point has been too Eurocentric for me to be a sufficiently able teacher in this area. I know I'll only be able to teach history cursorily in a year-long course covering literally everything, but I want to have enough prior knowledge to be able to give depth when possible and answer questions appropriately. Especially since I'm going to be teaching in a primarily African-American school, I want to be able to teach them properly about Africa. Thank you so much for any and everything!
AskHistorians has a very good book list, but it's fairly large. These are some of the books I'd recommend you read to get up to speed on general knowledge about East Asian and African history. They're all very good, and should be available at a university library if you have access. You can also get pdfs of them online in some places.
East Asia
The Search For Modern China - Jonathan D. Spence.
Imperial China 900-1800 - F.W. Mote.
The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han - Mark Edward Lewis.
The Making of Modern Japan - Marius Jansen
I don't want to inundate you with books until you can't choose, this topic has a wide range of deep scholarship. I'll just come out and give my fullest recommendation to F.W. Mote and Spence's books - they are the best general introductions to Chinese history on the market.
Africa
Recent African history - I recommend reading up on this, as this is a particularly complex, fraught and important aspect of world history. Good to make sure you get your facts straight.
The Scramble for Africa - Thomas Pakenham
The Fate of Africa - Martin Meredith
Earlier African history
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World; 1400-1800 - John K. Thornton
The Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730-1830 - Joseph Miller
The Great Lakes of Africa - Jean-Pierre Chretien
History of Islam in Africa - Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwels
If there's anything more specific you want to read up on, I'm also happy to help. I'm not an American, but I know that their world history classes often cover vast areas (both physically and time-wise), so I imagine teachers have to put work into making sure they can succinctly teach students very complex things in a short space of time. An American I once knew once had a syllabus that covered both the Bantu Migrations, the Babylonian captivity and all of Ancient Egyptian history (with a host of everything else), in the same class.
Don't have the resources you asked for - just wanna let you know that what makes you a history teacher isn't your knowledge of histoircal timelines and events, it's the knowledge of methods that give you the skills required to quickly adapt to any subject you need to teach. You don't need to have everything in your head, you just need to know what to look for and how to separate the relevant from the irrelevant, the good from the bad.
Have you checked out what the syllabus is covering? I think it's better for you to research the specifically relevant topics rather than general attempts to cover the history of entire continents. You won't really put the latter into much practice.
Also, if you haven't already, it's probably worthwhile to purchase alumni database access from your ex-institution.