Kendrick Lamar made a special trip to High Tech High School in New Jersey recently, where he sat in with students and listened to their poetry while they talked about the importance of his albums and work. This meeting was all set up when the student's teacher, 29-year-old Brian Mooney, used Kendrick's recent album, To Pimp a Butterfly, in class to draw correlations between the message of the music and Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye.

Following the success in the class, Mooney decided to share the results of the curriculum online, where it then reached over 10,000 FaceBook shares and found its way to Kendrick and his team. “I was feeling incredibly grateful and humbled that my work received that much exposure and reached that wide of an audience that Kendrick himself read it,” Mooney said. Kendrick didn't charge the school to come speak, and the administration encouraged the involvement with students, which also included a full panel discussion in front of the entire school, with Kendrick speaking on his community interactions and message. “You identify with my community and what’s going on in the world. And I appreciate you for that,” Kendrick said to the students before pledging to come back in the near future.

Situations like this are just a small reason why Kendrick is so highly regarded in the publics and makes it clear to see why he was recently honored by the California State Senate with the "Generational Icon Award." Full details on Kendrick's trip to the school can be found here via the New York Times.