MC Grammar, the teacher turned artiste who raps about kids books and grammar

LONDON – Jacob Mitchell started out as a star student. At Foulds School, just north of London, England, he did his homework, enjoyed the perks of being a teacher’s son and discovered rap while performing hip-hop rap number Boom! Shake The Room (1993) in a talent show when he was nine.

But once he was a teenager, his sparkle started to fade.

“I just sort of lost my way,” he said. “I could remember all the lyrics to songs, but I couldn’t remember basic facts for science.”

Bored and discouraged, he talked back to teachers, landed in detention and stopped caring about his studies. He said: “I just felt, at one point, ‘I don’t want to do this any more.’”

At 16, he dropped out of school and went to work for his father’s party business, then at a hardware store. He was writing his own music, mostly rap, but felt as if all the promise had drained out of his life.

A silver lining of this year-long “lull”, as he called it: Mitchell discovered self-help books.

Eventually, he returned to school, older, wiser and better acquainted with his own strengths.

He gave up on silent memorisation and instead wrote raps – about media, sociology, criminology – mastering them with the same zeal he had brought to his favourite artistes’ music. His grades soared. So did his confidence.

He went to university, graduated with honours, became a teacher and decided to share his unorthodox approach with struggling students.

Now, under the name of his alter ego, MC Grammar, Mitchell, 40, has become a wildly popular performer whose rhymes have made reading and grammar all the rage among young people across Britain.

MC Grammar’s YouTube channel has 48,800 subscribers and he has 212,000 followers on Instagram. He filled theatres during a solo tour in Britain, and electrified arenas as one of the headliners for a 30-city tour focused on performances for children. He has two TV shows, Wonder Raps and Rap Tales.

And early in 2025, Simon & Schuster UK will publish The Adventures Of Rap Kid, the first of three books Mitchell describes as similar to American author and cartoonist Jeff Kinney’s Diary Of A Wimpy Kid book series (2007 to present), “but slightly more street”.

So how does a former troublemaker make his way to centre stage at England’s biggest venues?

In 2019, Ms Rebecca Mottershead hired Mitchell for his first full-time position at Church Hill School, not far from where he grew up. He immediately became part of the fabric of the school.

“At lunchtime, he’d be playing football with the kids,” she said. “He was running stuff after school. Teaching was a way of life for Jacob.”

Five years into his tenure at Church Hill, Ms Mottershead put Mitchell in charge of a class of 10- and 11-year-olds who needed to be prepared for a new standardised test. The name alone had spinach vibes: SpaG, for spelling, punctuation and grammar. The students were not enthused.

Mitchell said: “I was like, you know what, I’m not going to waste any time on teaching this rote examination just for the sake of it. I don’t want kids to be looking at their writing and squeezing in an adverbial phrase.”

He wrote a four-minute song encompassing the material and set it to a catchy beat.

Within days, young people who had resisted prepositional phrases were rapping about them. When Mitchell called, “Hit me with the rhyme, guys”, his students snapped into action, chanting the words. They made their own music video. They were singing in the hallways.

By 2015, Mitchell’s sixth year teaching, Church Hill’s scores for reading and writing had improved dramatically, landing it among the top 50 primary schools in England.

Ms Mottershead said: “It became apparent that Jacob’s approach wasn’t just something that was just going to work in our school. This was something bigger.”

Mitchell travelled to other schools, training teachers around London. There was some resistance – rap is not everyone’s cup of tea – but there was no denying the excitement of the younger generation.

Then he did a few live shows, rapping about adverbs and conjunctions. Nobody was more surprised by his popularity than he was.

“I’m like, are you serious? This is just a jesty way I engage with the kids,” he said. “And then we’re branching out. We’re going to Liverpool. We’re going to Manchester. We’re going to Birmingham. Scotland. Italy. It keeps growing and growing and growing. And then they’re like, ‘Have you got anything for reading?’”

So Mitchell applied his technique to a few picture books – mainly classics such as Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) and Sam McBratney’s Guess How Much I Love You (1994).

Mitchell introduced his own rhymes, but he made sure the original messages were, as he put it, “very, very clear”.

In 2019, his wife made a video of him rapping Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo (1999) for their daughter, Ellie. She posted it on Facebook.

“The next day we woke up and it had a quarter of a million views,” Mitchell said. “And then it went up to a million. Five million. Ten million. That’s when Ellen called.”

American talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres flew the Mitchell family to Los Angeles, where MC Grammar serenaded both of his daughters with a rendition of Dr Seuss’ Green Eggs And Ham (1960) on her show.

Suddenly, the floodgates opened. Mitchell was inundated with requests for appearances, interviews and his agent’s name. “My agent?” he said. “I’ve got a head teacher. That’s all I’ve got right now.”

Two years ago, he left teaching to dedicate himself to a “global classroom”. Some of his most ardent fans have autism, others are reluctant readers.

He is sometimes able to reach students who have not responded in a traditional classroom.

“We had a situation where, by the end of the show, a teacher is in tears,” Mitchell said. “She goes, ‘That kid there, who got on the stage and rapped your whole song, hasn’t said a word this whole academic year.’ And they’re speaking with tone, intonation. Swagger. They’re dancing.”

Ms Shevonne Waines’ son, Henry, met Mitchell in December 2023 at a holiday party at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, where he had spent the first 15 months of his life.

Henry, then six, had never seen or heard about MC Grammar, but he immediately hit the dance floor and raised his hand when Mitchell requested volunteers.

He then joined Mitchell onstage, Waines wrote in an e-mail, “with tubing hanging from his neck and an adult attached at the other end with his breathing machine”.

The pair sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Ms Waines said: “It was this miracle moment. MC Grammar creates this safe, energetic world where you can do anything.” NYTIMES