Teacher on leave after reading poem with N-word

San Diego 4th-grade instructor apologizes and says she ‘learned a tremendous lesson.’

SAN DIEGO — A charter school teacher has been placed on leave after she said the N-word while reading a poem to her class last week.

Amy Glancy, who teaches fourth grade at High Tech Elementary in Point Loma, has been placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation, according to the charter school.

“On Tuesday, a teacher at High Tech Elementary read a poem to students that included language that was upsetting to some students. We take these matters very seriously,” Anthony Millican, spokesperson for the school network High Tech High, said in a statement. “High Tech High is committed to making sure that school is a safe space for all of our students.”

Glancy read the poem “Incident” by Countee Cullen, a Harlem Renaissance poet who wrote during the 1920s and 1930s.

In the poem, a Black narrator describes a visit to Baltimore as an 8-year-old. The incident referred to in the title involves a boy sticking out his tongue and calling the narrator the N-word. The narrator says that although he spent seven months in Baltimore, that’s all he remembers of it.

Glancy’s reading of the poem included the use of the N-word.

Glancy apologized in an email to students’ parents and said she does not condone the use of the word.

“I learned a tremendous lesson today while trying to teach your students about the mood and tone of poetry,” she wrote to parents. “The lesson was intended to demonstrate that the poet’s words can evoke emotion — in this case, anger and sadness. Unfortunately, it triggered some very big emotions for the students that I did not anticipate.”

Some experts say such incidents illustrate the importance of teachers receiving training in how to talk to students about race, ethnicity and cultural identity.

Michael Dominguez — an assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at San Diego State who chairs San Diego Unified’s ethnic studies committee — said nobody outside of the Black community should use the N-word, even in the context of a reading in an academic setting. The word is one of several that can cause extreme reactions because they are linked to histories of trauma and marginalization, he said.

“Words matter . ... Without context, without preparation, without framing and ref lection, to see one of those words or hear one of those words pop up in the context of literature can be really triggering, because it triggers this whole historical link of trauma, frustration and feeling of otherness,” Dominguez said.

To properly address such a topic, the teacher would need a great deal of planning, structure and expertise, he said.

“It requires training, it requires skill and it requires support, and we need to be providing our teachers with more of that, not surfacelevel stuff,” he said.

Francine Maxwell, chairperson of the San Diegobased group Black Men and Women United, said she had received calls from High Tech High families about last week’s incident.

She called the incident hurtful and suggested that implicit bias or cultural sensitivity training is a start toward preventing such missteps from occurring in the future.

“We have to acknowledge the trauma that was caused and what we can do to move past it and begin to heal,” she said. “Given that it’s Black History Month and things are amplified, we’re looking at it as an opportunity to begin the dialogue that did not take place.”