“My contribution is a photo of four baby sweaters that I knit on my breaks and during Zoom meetings between May and December 2020.”

Baby sweaters created by Gillian

2020 was a year of big changes at work and at home! Having operated as the primary distance tutor for several years, it was great to now have the whole team on board and know that they’d transitioned so seamlessly and would do an amazing job supporting students remotely as I got ready to go on maternity leave.

Teaching strategies

With the shift to online learning and tutoring, tasks became less varied and the workday changed dramatically in the absence of visits from coworkers and students dropping by throughout the day to break things up. Taking little breaks, to make tea, take a walk, or do a bit of knitting, became a necessity.

I once read something written by another knitter that really stuck with me. She said that knitters are a particularly resilient and persistent sort of people; we make a mistake, rip out an entire project, and start over, and we’ll keep doing it over and over until we’ve got it just right. Good writing, I think, and a good writing process, is just like that: go back, fix that hole, add bobbles or some other fancy bit. Repeat until it’s a thing you want to wear. I try to share this mindset with students, and to apply as much patience and determination in my own writing, while also keeping in mind that the alternative is to just leave it alone! Sometimes making a conscious choice that it’s “good enough” is the right thing to do with your time and mental health.

Gillian Saunders

In my current role as an EAL Specialist, my main areas of expertise are sentence structure, eliminating wordiness, and helping EAL learners acquire the tools they need to build strong, clear sentences and paragraphs. I truly believe that being an effective writer is a skill that can be taught and acquired, and I look forward to helping students set and achieve their writing goals.