Being a CELTA trainee can be a consuming life experience, especially if you’re taking the intensive 4-week course. The information and teaching techniques you’re exposed to can start to gradually seep into your everyday life — sometimes in less than convenient ways! Here are 25 signs that you’ve become a dyed-in-the-wool CELTA convert:

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1. Your significant other asks where you want to go for dinner and you try to elicit “sushi.”

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2. You automatically think of appropriate gist tasks when you read news articles.

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3. You use hot error correction techniques to correct your friends’ grammar slips.

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4. Researching your future life abroad becomes your go-to procrastination hobby.

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5. You instinctively ask yourself if your aims were achieved after social interactions.

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6. “Sleep” becomes a personal aim.

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7. You tell your friends to check in pairs before confirming group plans.

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8. You make sure all your social media posts are appropriately cited.

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9. You start hearing features of connected speech in your day-to-day life and wondering how you never noticed them before.

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10. You get excited when you hear someone naturally use the third conditional.

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11. When someone gives you instructions, you criticize how wordy they were.

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12. You start asking ICQs with your friends and family.

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13. You can’t consume any media without wondering if it would fit into your next lesson.

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14. You start to realize how strong your own accent is.

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15. You begin to question if you really know ‘how to English’ at all.

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16. The letters FOL, SRT, LRT, and LFC start to show up in your dreams (or maybe nightmares…).

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17. You gradually become less flustered by people staring at you blankly after you’ve said something.

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18. You naturally start monitoring other people’s conversations at parties.

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19. You make a list of anticipated problems and solutions before running errands.

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20. You count syllables instead of sheep to help you fall asleep at night.

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21. You wonder why your sandwich is blue until you realize you have whiteboard marker stains on your fingers.

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22. You convince yourself that an entire lesson was a failure because the black whiteboard marker didn’t work.

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23. You get panicky just thinking about a photocopier machine.

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24. You consider getting a permanent IV drip of coffee into your arm.

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25. You mentally give your 8th grade Spanish teacher “below standard”.

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Special thanks to my colleagues Jeff Sobieraj, James Pengelley, Sarah Adams, and Hector Navarro for ideas & inspiration!