You’re missing a very fundamental fact about history classes in the US–they spent approximately 30 weeks of the school year going through the colonial era and the Revolutionary and Civil Wars (or if it’s world history, going through ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome and Ellizabethan England). That means everything else has to be wedged into the other 6 weeks of the school year. I have never once, in any history class I ever took in 12 years of public education, made it past the stock market crash in '29, and that was after wedging the entirety of WWI and the Roaring 20’s into one week. We never covered the majority of the Depression, much less WWII. Everything I know about the Korean War, I learned from Alan Alda, and let’s not even get into the piecemeal nature of my understanding of the Space Race, 'Nam, and the oil embargo.
FTR, I knew it was German for “lightning war” but I was under the impression it had to do with bombing runs over London. Like I said, we never got further than the crash, so most of my knowledge comes from novels and haphazardly-read Time Life books.
Unless, of course, you grew up a stone’s throw from Manassas battlefield. In that case, you would have spent 35 of those weeks on the American Civil War, because your history teacher’s obsession with it is the whole reason s/he moved here in the first place. S/he is writing a dissertation on some esoteric detail of the war which s/he honestly (and naively) believes no one else has ever thought of before, much less presented to you. This is a specious notion, deserving of all the contempt a seventh grade class can spew toward it. And believe me, we did.
Fortunately, this was balanced by a population heavily strewn with military Moms and Dads, who took it upon themselves to educate us, at least on topics of major wars and which Generals to root for at the movies.