Kendrick Lamar performs onstage during Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show at Caesars Superdome on February 09, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Photo credit Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

Regis Inge, a teacher with the Compton Unified School District, says he’s proud of all his students who reach their full potential. But there’s one former pupil whose success gets the most attention.

When Kendrick Lamar was in seventh grade, Inge was responsible for sparking the future Pulitzer winner’s appreciation of poetry.

“What I remember most about Kendrick is just being a quiet, shy kid. He was no different than any other kids in the neighborhood at that time,” Inge said.

Inge said he brought poetry into the classroom as a way to help students who were going through difficulties at home learn to express themselves in ways that didn’t involve fighting or lashing out. He had a hard time getting the boys in his class interested until he told them poetry was “nothing but hip-hop without the music part.”

“I wanted them to understand the passion, and I really was enforcing that because I wanted people to understand how much pain they would have to go through sometimes at home. Or I wanted them to understand what it feels like to live in Compton when you have to walk through dangerous neighborhoods just to get to school,” Inge said. “The only way you can do that is to help a person who does not live in Compton, nor California, nor even the United States maybe, but if they read your poem, they can get a great visual of what it is to live in the city that we’re talking about.”

The students ended up having poetry slams in class. When kids of different races and backgrounds opened up about their lives, they realized their experiences weren’t so different.

“That brought down tension that was in Compton at that time,” Inge said. “That helped them understand, like, hey, we’re going through the same battle.”

Inge said Lamar was a “great student,” but he didn’t know he’d continued writing verse until someone told him his former student had become a rapper.

“I said, no way Kendrick Duckworth is a rapper,” he recalled.

After listening to Lamar’s mixtape Overly Dedicated, Inge called him and said, “I don’t know what you did between my class and high school, man, but this is brilliant.”

He said he encouraged Lamar to “keep pressing on” and putting his vision into words.

“So I’m just super proud of him, man,” Inge said. “Just to see him in L.A. doing it, doing it at the SoFi of all places, it’s a dream come true for a teacher.”

Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s Grand National Tour will head to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood for three sold-out shows on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.