CHS English teacher Mike Vial didn’t get the idea of teaching until late into his college career, he went in thinking he would do something with music. He was walking on the campus of Western University one day when he suddenly couldn’t get the idea out of his head.
“My journey into teaching is so connected to music that it’s hard to separate the two,” Vial said.
But within Vial’s journey through music and into teaching, the best thing that happened to him was actually a time that he failed. It reshaped him into a better and more unique person.
“The best thing that happened was that I didn’t get into the jazz programs,” Vial said. “I needed a failure to measure against and redefine who I could be.”
Click here to watch a video of Vial’s song “A World That’s Bigger”.
Come sophomore year of college, Vial was still invested in music. He didn’t get in to any of the music programs he applied for initially his freshman year, but he thought that it was his calling. Then one day, he walked by the education center at Western University one day and had a revelation that he wanted to be a teacher. He realized that it wasn’t music; it was teaching.
In college, Vial’s English 101 teacher was one of the people that inspired him to take on the subject of English. He thinks of her as one of the best teachers ever, even though she wasn’t even a professor yet. In her mid-20s, she was enthusiastic about teaching and could relate with her students.
“I didn’t know I was a reader, but I guess I was,” Vial said. “I thought I was just a kid with a guitar attached to him.”
Although Vial has been invested in music for as long as he can remember, he ironically hates teaching music. Teaching a 7-year-old how to hold a guitar multiple times isn’t exactly on his to-do list. However, Vial was once a full-time musician. He toured all around Michigan as well as into other states in 2018-2019 with his band, writing songs and singing while playing guitar. On Saturday, Feb. 19 of this year, he played at the North Star Cafe.
“I’m like James Taylor on a lot of coffee, Ed Sheeran before he went pop,” Vial said. “Music has always been my thing that I need.”
When Vial is playing guitar, he calls it his “flow state.” Coined by a psychologist, Vial says that the word means that people can get so invested in what they’re doing that they lose track of time. This summer, Vial plans to put out his fifth record.
Along with music, Vial also has other things going on in his life; he is married and has two kids. He admits that he became a better teacher because of his everyday parenting. For Vial, there are some crossovers between the two jobs.
Vial’s teaching career has lasted a long while, and he has gone through many ups and downs. He taught at a high school for 8 years, then quit to play music full time for 6 years and toured around east Mississippi, as well as taught guitar lessons on the side.
In 2017, Vial was crossing the road one day to play at the Ark in Ann Arbor. Suddenly, he was hit by a car that didn’t see him. The police officer that came to help him coincidentally was his student from one of the first classes he ever taught.
“I don’t believe in things happening for a reason,” Vial said. “But, I was starting to wonder if it was time to get off the road, time to stop driving 120,000 miles.”
Vial then continued his career in teaching up until now (2026); he was hired at CHS in 2021. He mentioned that it took him twenty years and a pandemic for him to finally get hired at this school. To him, the school feels different from other schools he has taught at for the reason he says most students say: the freedom, the open campus and the teachers.
“I think that’s a shared experience,” Vial said. “We need to acknowledge and maintain it as a blessing.”
Even though he is not fond of block scheduling specifically for his portion of the English department, Vial likes the community aspect of CHS. Getting to see his students every day and hear their stories is a highlight of his day.
“I get to know them a little bit more,” Vial said. “I get to hear a lot more of the winds of the hockey tournament, seeing the writings and readings every day.”
Composition is one of Vial’s favorite classes to teach because he gets to talk about themes of literature and identifying themes, connecting them to personal lives. He believes that sometimes, stories in students’ lives happen at just the right time where it resonates with what they’re reading.
“Community High is more than its great location, which obviously draws into it,” Vial said. “It’s that students have more than likely chosen to come here, like I have as a teacher. Like LeBron’s ‘Letter to Cleveland,’ students inspire me to be better.”
