In my experience, calling out a teacher, as I expected, didn’t end well and I have tried to avoid it since. I have two anecdotes to share which may serve as calibrators to help evaluate your daughter’s teacher’s comments and determine the more appropriate response. My eldest had a science teacher who played favourites to the extent that she proudly boasted that she was helping the career of a junior teacher in the school who had been her favourite ex-student. In contrast, she seemed to resent our daughter’s privileged background and tried every way possible to deduct marks from my daughter and put her down.
Whilst my husband and I both caught glimpses of her resentment from parent teacher interviews, we did not get involved until she, astonishingly, gave my daughter a merit certificate literally for ‘Coming second in X topic test’ on the only occasion that my daughter didn’t come first in an assessed activity, having never given her any sort of merit recognition before that test. My best friend agreed that in the overall context of her general attitude to my daughter, it was devious provocation, so I found errors in her marking and wrote to the school questioning her understanding of the topic concepts, whereupon an interview was organised, during which she broke down in tears and accused us of ‘bullying’ her. After that, I told my daughter she had taken enough subjects that she didn’t need high marks for that subject and she quietly continued to do her best in that class whilst avoiding any direct contact with the teacher.
My daughter also had a maths teacher who taught her intermittently for three years. At every single parent teacher interview, she would keep stating to me that boys are slower developers than girls and that they would at some point overtake my daughter (which never happened BTW). In the last interview, I decided to take a different tact and after greeting her at the beginning of the interview, I asked how her sons were doing at Uni, which led to a pleasant chat about her sons’ achievements over the entire allocated time for the interview and an improved classroom relationship between her and my daughter, according to the latter.
With three kids, I’ve gone to a lot of parent teacher interviews and ‘gut feelings’ usually turn out to be quite accurate, but I’ve found it much more effective to work with my children than to try to actively influence the dynamics at school. My kids, particularly my son, have also been very fortunate to have had some fantastic teachers who have gone above & beyond to make a lot of opportunities available, so we try to focus on the positives (I nominated one of my son’s teachers for a prestigious external award and she received some well deserved recognition).
FWIW, I’ve found that the best approach is to let my kids drive the agenda and just throw appropriate resources & support behind their campaigns. In your specific situation, I wonder what your daughter wants. Natural aptitude doesn’t necessarily result in a passion for maths. My daughters both also have natural aptitudes for maths but apart from being early school entrants, weren’t interested in any further subject acceleration, so whilst they have each taken the highest levels of maths studies, they haven’t formally worked ahead of their classmates. Instead, they always focused on being on top of topic contents and have achieved without acceleration. My son, however, loves maths and explores the vast bulk of it himself, so when the maths HoD gave him the opportunity, he completed four years of the high school curriculum online in six months because, for him, most of it was just revision.
