Teacher turned artiste who raps about grammar

MC Grammar's unorthodox approach to teaching English is capturing the attention of students in Britain and beyond

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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 to Eventually, he returned 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.