I wasn't particularly smart growing up, either, and I failed to place into the middle-school algebra classes like most of my peers. Somehow clicked for me in hi

I wasn't particularly smart growing up, either, and I failed to place into the middle-school algebra classes like most of my peers. Somehow clicked for me in high school, though, and I raced through the curriculum at an accelerated pace, finishing with Calculus my senior year. A few years after that I graduated from MIT with an aerospace engineering degree. My grandfather never advanced beyond trigonometry in high school, but went on to become a moderately famous theoretical physicist. So if we're looking at anecdotes, it's hard to form a clear conclusion. Today I teach high school mathematics and I see accelerated kids who fall to pieces their junior year, and also kids like me who arrive in the 9th grade knowing nothing, but somehow end up in an accelerated track by the time they graduate.