I taught a course on Neo-Confucianism during the Spring 2018 semester, and used Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction as our main textbook. Our end-of-semester teaching evaluations can be customized to add specific questions, so I asked: “How did the course textbook work for you? Were there chapters or topics that were particularly helpful or particularly difficult?” The students’ (anonymous) answers were:

• The course textbook was interesting and relatively easy to understand. Honestly, I think every topic was equally helpful. I am very glad that we extensively used the course textbook.
• The textbook is very useful. It gives me the background knowledge to this course.
• The textbook was great, I relied on it heavily to revisit the descriptions of certain concepts when they were feeling too abstract.
• The course textbook seemed good to me. It was organized cleanly so that I could refer to the relevant chapter when I had a question about a topic, and it was pretty detailed without being overly dense for a textbook. The politics chapter was particularly helpful, as I didn’t know much about late Imperial policy questions.
• The textbooks are very helpful.Since the instructor is the co–author of one of them, he explains the content better.
• I like the textbook very much, it has a clear logic and does a good job explaining concepts. The way chapters are arranged is also cohesive and good for a systematic understanding of Neo–Confucianism.
• The textbook is very helpful. Perhaps it could go deeper in general but I understand that we may not have enough time for the course.
• The course textbook was difficult to understand in the beginning, but later on it was much easier. I think most of the topics and chapters were difficult to understand until I put more effort reading them and discussing them in class.
• The chapters were very helpful in making me understand Neo–Confucianism. It was very clear and the quotes were helpful. It was also organized in just the right way.
• I thought that it was really great and that things were set out there very clearly and supplemented class very well.
• It was helpful on the whole
• the textbook was perfectly laid out, very organized, and taught the material in a clear and concise way