the adults in question control a lot of their lives, and can make things very uncomfortable. Children DO get bullied by school staff, and my DW has seen direct examples. They're often going to consider it in their best interests to say nothing and avoid escalation, and they'll only gain the confidence to speak up when they're convinced, by words and by actions, that their parents have their backs.
Though I agree in theory that at age 9, a child should be able to advocate for themselves, in reality, it is impossible for many kids to do so. I was one of those kids who was in the OP's child's situation when I was pulled into advocacy meetings with my parents. Though I laugh about it in retrospect, I was almost traumatized at that age when I was forced to take a stand against a really stern teacher whose classroom was not at all fun to begin with.
Children can easily be the victims of adults (teachers) and they spend more waking time with these teachers than they do with their families in a day. A teacher can make life uncomfortable for a child who labeled her class as "boring" (and by extension, implying that she is incompetent at her job) in front of other adults in an advocacy meeting. My child at age 6 says that his 1st grade teacher used a "mean voice" to talk to him and though she said nothing wrong, it hurt his feelings that she used that voice to tell him to do some things in class. That is just a small example of the "bullying" from teachers that children face in school.
So, I prefer to do any advocacy by myself with a lot of data and facts to back me up and I would tell the teacher to test my child for proficiency rather than ask my child for feedback. I would also tell them that the very fact that I had to advocate and they were unable to figure out my child's giftedness through classroom observation or testing is their fault. (I am also the kind of parent who would rather change schools than get into prolonged advocacy battles, so take my post with a grain of salt!).
Any email communication between child and teacher is prohibited in our school.
