On reading and writing..............

Justin Wehr, while "helping" his school-teaching Mom try to
figure out how to instill into fourth graders the importance of
reading and writing, offers not much help.  Who gets bitten with
the love of reading and/or writing, and who doesn't, remains
pretty much a mystery.  Just like most things about us humans. 
Still, he writes an interesting post -here.  Excerpt here:

I think we’re taught that reading and writing are like eating our vegetables, that they are nice, nutritious skills to have for learning and for professional survival in a world of email. But it shouldn’t be true that that’s why we do them. At least not writing. Reading to me is pretty vegetable-like in that it’s mainly just something I do for learning or amusement, but writing has become so much more important to me than veggie-like nutrition. It is my means of processing the world, of thinking. And probably most importantly it is my means of purging all the gunk that’s building up, the stuff that is bothering me. I call it “cleansing my psychospiritual colon.”