It just sounds like she really doesn't know what she's looking for. Growing up I was always more on the math side of things. I remember being very upset at my K teacher for telling the class that you couldn't subtract bigger numbers from smaller ones (I remember thinking, duh, that just means you have negative numbers!) and in 3rd grade the school tried to higher an algebra teacher for me (who rarely showed up... ugh). Despite that I definitely had some teachers who questioned if I should be in the gifted program (even though I had an IQ test in 1st). One in particular kept threatening to have me pulled out because I was always a bad speller and never put any effort into grammar related homework (I HATED grammar). There was definitely this idea that to be gifted you had to be perfect in everything.
I'm assuming verbal kids are just going to be more obvious by how they speak. Obviously, it also depends on a kid's personality (if your kid doesn't volunteer info or ask questions then the teacher just might not notice) or it could very well be that the teacher doesn't notice the kids' advanced questions in math and then the kids shut down and give up on asking them.
However, if she's been teaching 30 years with and average of 80 kids in K every year that means 2400 kids have been through that school during that time. If 1% are gifted you have 240 kids and I have a really hard time believing that ALL of them were verbally gifted!!!! That would mean if your kid is the only kid that's advanced in math that means in your school you have only 0.4% of kids that are advanced in math vs. verbal, which sounds very, very unrealistic (clearly there are always statistical outliers but this one is just insane)! Now I could believe that the kids were not as gifted in math (I have non clue where your kid is at...) so they didn't get noticed because of that but still...
