I have been getting feedback from teachers and staff that makes it clear they feel she is a classic hothouse kid and I am the ultimate tiger mom. I wouldn't care so much except that it almost seems as though they are just waiting around for her to fail or at least return to the level of her peers. If I hear 'it will all level out' one more time......
Ouch.
Well, highly motivated or not, it sounds to ME as though you aren't the one doing the hothousing. It's entirely voluntary. I suspect that you may be getting that vibe from school staffers as a result of your involvement in the math club-- but hey, you have skills and you offered them to the benefit of an entire GROUP of children. Sheesh-- I fail to see how that is wrong in any way, shape, or form.
Assuming for a moment that her peers are mostly in the 105-115 range, um-- 134 is well beyond that.
Is the math artificially high?
Maybe. It depends on whether the evaluation was based on exposure and achievement or upon raw aptitude. The difficulty is that there is a fair degree of overlap betwixt the two at 3rd-7th grades, honestly.
How
rapidly does she seem to learn relative to those classmates of hers? You have a way to observe that since you have a window via the math club.
That seems to be one of the 'tells' of kids who are truly gifted, particularly those who are at those higher levels-- they just learn it so much FASTER upon exposure to concepts. Bear in mind, though, that brain wiring isn't necessarily much different in a child with an FSIQ of 129 versus 132. There's no bright dividing line between "gifted" and "not gifted." The numbers are just numbers in the face of the actual presentation of the child you have in front of you.
If she doesn't seem to learn
far faster than her peers, it is possible that she's just motivated and interested. That FSIQ value still indicates (to me, anyway) that she's probably MG, which means that no, you're not hothousing-- she's just stumbled upon a domain that she's interested in pursuing, and you've (rightly) made it possible for her to do that.
That is not really any different than signing an athletic child up for Little League, swim lessons, or Aikido. I notice that nobody seems to label THAT behavior TigerParenting, or go looking for evidence of stress/failure in the child as a result. {sigh}
