A California teacher is receiving backlash after a student recorded her repeatedly saying the N-word, ABC 7 News reported.

Yesterday (April 6), a classroom full of middle schoolers were reading a Mark Twain novel. Then, a student asked the instructor about the spelling of the N-word.

In response, the language arts teacher stood before the class and told them the word was English. The unidentified Sequoia Middle School educator also told the students that anybody could say the N-word if they wanted to.

“It’s in the dictionary, and people are oversensitive over the word,” the teacher said in the video.

According to a Black student, who recorded the video and chose anonymity, the California instructor attempted to get a student to say the word as she repeatedly did. “She was trying to force him to say the word, and she repeatedly kept saying it, and she had a smirk on her face,” the student recalled. “I was just thinking, ‘Dang, this teacher is out of her mind.'”

Once parents learned of the incident, they were also very displeased. One parent, Caroline Rivera, shared her thoughts with the news channel. “Not acceptable,” Rivera said. The California mother has two children that attend the school. And in her opinion, the language arts educator should be disciplined.

“Pulling the teacher out? Maybe going through training again?” she suggested.

The teacher chose not to comment on the recorded incident when contacted. The school district, however, did release a statement, although it didn’t share if the instructor was disciplined or not.

“While we acknowledge that this derogatory language comes from a novel first published in the late 1800s and that historical context is important to consider when discussing literature, the district does not condone the language used in the video or using that language outside of the context of discussing the novel,” the Fontana Unified School District wrote.