MC Grammar raps his way toward a 'global classroom'

LONDON.- Jacob Mitchell started out as a star student. At Foulds School, just north of London, he did his homework, enjoyed the perks of being a teacher’s son and discovered rap while performing “Boom! Shake the Room” in an “epic” talent show when he was 9.

But once Mitchell 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 — Tupac, Biggie, Big L — but I couldn’t remember basic facts for science.”

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

At 16, Mitchell 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.

“I was one of those guys who got a job they didn’t want to do,” he said. “I felt like no one could understand how I was feeling.”

A silver lining of this yearlong “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 memorization and instead wrote raps — about media, sociology, criminology — mastering them with the same zeal he’d brought to his favorite artists’ music. His grades soared. So did his confidence.

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

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

This might be hard to fathom, but consider the numbers: MC Grammar’s YouTube channel has 48,800 subscribers, and he has 212,000 followers on Instagram. He filled theaters during a solo national tour and electrified arenas as one of the headliners for a 30-city tour focused on performances for children. He has two television shows, “Wonder Raps” and “Rap Tales.”

And next spring, Simon & Schuster UK will publish “The Adventures of Rap Kid,” the first of three books Mitchell described as “similar to ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ but slightly more street.”

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So how does a former troublemaker make his way from High Barnet, a quiet bedroom community of attached houses, to center stage at England’s biggest venues?

In 2019, 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, Mottershead put Mitchell in charge of a class of 10- and 11-year-olds who needed to be prepared for a new standardized 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.

Mottershead said, “Jacob took the boring stuff and he made it so exciting that everybody wanted to be part of it.”

She recalled a student who’d had an air of “I can’t do it. I’m no good.” One day she spotted him in Mitchell’s classroom, absorbed in a book. “I remember thinking, this is what he’s needed,” she said. “The conventional classroom just does not work for this child.”

Mitchell wrote more songs about commas, clauses and adjectives. He ordered an MC Hammer costume and, as an intro to new lessons, announced, “Stop, it’s grammar time.”

His students were too young to get the reference, but their test results reflected their enthusiasm.

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.

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

Mitchell traveled to other schools, training teachers around London. There was some resistance — rap isn’t everyone’s cup of tea — but there was no denying the excitement of the younger generation. Then Mitchell 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 like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and “Guess How Much I Love You.” He introduced his own rhymes but he made sure the original messages were, as he put it, “very, very clear.”

In 2019, Mitchell’s wife made a video of him rapping “The Gruffalo” for their daughter, Ellie. She posted it to 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.” Ellen, as in Ellen DeGeneres, flew the Mitchell family to Los Angeles, where MC Grammar serenaded both of his daughters with a rendition of “Green Eggs and Ham” 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!”

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Two years ago, Mitchell left teaching to dedicate himself to a “global classroom,” as he called it. Some of his most ardent fans have autism; others are reluctant readers. He is sometimes able to reach students who haven’t 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 onstage 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.”

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

Henry, then 6, 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 email, “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.” Waines said: “It was this miracle moment. MC Grammar creates this safe, energetic world where you can do anything.”

Henry is now a devotee. He attended a second performance in April and enjoys Mitchell’s raps on Instagram and YouTube.

The fact that many young people discover his work onscreen doesn’t faze Mitchell. “Your kid’s there already,” he said. “At the end of every book rap, I say, ‘You’ve had a look, now go and read the book.’ I put affiliate links. You as a parent can go and buy it if you want. You can go to a library.”

And unlike an iPad, Mitchell added, books never become obsolete. “The older they get, the better they get.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.