Any average-to-above average kid--with enough confidence and a good support group of peers and teachers--can perform well in these courses. Anyone with trouble can get tutoring lessons as well (which could also be provided on the side)
No, they can't. Maybe a few kids with IQs (or specifically, math subtest IQs) in the 100-107-ish range could do well in calculus, but I strongly doubt that any random bunch of them could. And people with IQs of 93-ish? Seems a stretch to me.
I think that people want to believe that IQ is not the barrier that it is. But believing that the barrier isn't there also requires denying that really smart people who learn really fast exist. If you accept that some people have an innate ability to learn fast, you have to accept that some people learn slowly for the same reasons. Hence the accusations about hothousing cognitively gifted kids and ideas like "everyone is gifted" and "they all even out by third grade." They MUST be hothoused, because the alternative means that real differences exist.
Even many people here espouse the belief that average kids can take classes that are hard for people with IQs of +1 or even +2 SDs, which both surprises me and implies that discomfort runs very deep, probably for lots of reasons.
For every person who is so good, she can learn a year's worth of material in two weeks, there is a counterpart who can't learn it at all, ever. And for every person who can learn it in well in a year, there is someone who can only learn it poorly in a year.
