It's happened countless times. I'll be having a perfectly pleasant chat with a coworker, high school classmate or relative about that most endlessly fascinating of topics: the future. When the conversation rolls around to what everyone is up to these days, that familiar phrase grates across my eardrums: "Yeah, teaching's always been my backup in case [whatever] doesn't work out."

Nope. Teaching is no backup career, or something to come back to in case your "more successful, challenging and respectable" other idea doesn't work out.

I'm not referring to the late bloomers who spend as long as they could bear in another profession before they decided their heart belonged in a classroom. To you I say, welcome. We need people like you who want to be with our young people. More than want, we need people who having a burning passion for their work. In short, the only people who have any business teaching are the people who desperately want to be there.

To the rest, I ask you to recall (or imagine) a moment in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Whoopi Goldberg plays Sister Mary Clarence, the non-nun music teacher at a struggling San Francisco Catholic high school who at one point urges her talented but reluctant student to follow her dream of singing, saying: "If when you wake up in the morning you can't think of nothin' but singin' first...then you meant to be a singer, girl."

To anyone considering majoring in education or changing majors to education, I ask you to take a minute one more time and ask yourself why. Is it because you or your parents want you to do something safe? Because you figure practically babysitting all day has to be easier than Organic Chemistry? Because you're secretly afraid you might not be able to do whatever you really want to do?

Is it because you want to influence lives and touch the very future? Because you want to help create a better world? Because you want to share your enthusiasm for a subject you love? Help a struggling student succeed, one small, hard-won step at a time? Enjoy forty years or so of nonstop lightbulb moments? (I was this person.)

You'd better know why, because the work is tough and frustrating, no matter what people tell you. What's more, the comments will come at you from everywhere. "Why do you want to go into a failing system?" "What are you complaining about? I don't get summers off!" "You're going be poor your whole life, you know." And my personal favorite: "Hope you're planning on marrying a rich husband!"

You'll learn to let them all roll off your back like water, but not if you aren't firmly grounded in conviction and desire. Success, after all, lies in living out your passion. It helps to keep the haters at bay, since nothing deters the naysayers more than seeing someone happy despite what they think should be true.

If you don't have this conviction and desire, you will soon get discouraged and burned out, and begin to agree with the people who say that kids today are too ill-mannered and hooked on technology to learn, that they can go to school on Google anyway, no worse for wear. I'm not saying that you will love every minute of it. I'm only a student teacher, and I have already had my bad failed lesson days and my really bad sit-and-cry-in-the-car-and-seriously-question-if-I-really- have-what-it-takes-to-do-this days.

To paraphrase the illustrious Whoopi: "If when you wake up in the mornin' and you can't think of nothin' but teachin' first...then you meant to be a teacher."

If you don't fall into this category, I respectfully ask you to reconsider going into this profession, for your sake and definitely the sake of the students.