Man on a mission

 

It’s the last period of the day at Denby High School on the east side of Detroit. A young man wearing a tie is the last to arrive in the third-floor classroom of Ryan Pavel, BA ’12—that’s, Mr. Pavel to the young man and his classmates. This is Pavel’s debate class, and it’s time to practice some formal technique.

While this is not a lecture (Pavel leaves most of the speaking to the budding orators) it’s absolutely clear who is in charge. The former enlisted U.S. Marine and Arabic linguist with two deployments to Iraq has no problem at all establishing an assured sense of credibility.

Pavel in his office

“You’re making a permanent impact on students who are relying on you to get them to their next stage of life,” Pavel says. (Photo by J.D. Booth.)

Class distinction

Pavel wasn’t always this at ease in the classroom. At 17, the only child of a medical doctor and a counselor living in Barrington, Ill., he had what politely might be called an “unremarkable” grade point average. Not that college was out of the question—Pavel had been accepted to more than one school—but in his heart it simply wasn’t what he wanted.

“It would have been a poor use of resources,” he says. “I wanted to have a clear reason for going and it just wasn’t there.”

What was there was the U.S. Marine Corps and an opening for a cryptologic linguist. After graduating from high school in 2005, Pavel enlisted and completed his basic training in San Diego. He spent the next two years at the Defense Language Institute, becoming fluent in Modern Standard Arabic.

Completing the course (and earning an associate’s degree), Pavel headed to North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune before his first deployment, joining a small team stationed about 90 miles west of Baghdad.

He soon discovered his education was just beginning.

“Iraqis don’t actually speak Modern Standard Arabic, so one of the first adjustments was becoming proficient in their dialect of the language,” he says.

Between August 2008 and March 2009, Pavel served as a behind-the-scenes translator. On occasion he worked in the field as the go-between for U.S. and Iraqi commanders. “It was empowering,” he says.

Getting schooled

During his second deployment, five months after returning to Camp Lejeune, Pavel discovered the International Studies program at U-M. By this time, he did have “a clear reason for going” to college and decided to apply. He was promptly rejected.

“It was pretty disheartening when I got the news but I asked what I could do to change their mind,” he says. “It came down to the grade point average.”

Pavel set about acing his courses at Coastal Carolina Community College, a school with classrooms at Camp Lejeune. Two weeks later, he was accepted at U-M, where he soon connected with the University’s chapter of Student Veterans of America. The organization provided the support he needed to make the “jarring” transition from Marine to Wolverine. “I was successful because I had people I could turn to,” he says of the mentors and friends he met through the organization.

SVA members elected him vice president of the local chapter and he quickly ascended to president, with the key goal of boosting awareness of the organization and its services among campus veterans. “It’s hard to overstate just how important being involved with the Student Veterans of America was to me,” he says.

Pavel’s second year at U-M was just as intense as the first, with much of the academic focus on writing his thesis—on transitional justice in Iraq—under the guidance of Professor Victor B. Lieberman.

“It was an incredibly worthwhile process,” Pavel recalls. “That and my time with the SVA are two of my favorite memories.”

In the service

With existing credits on his record, Pavel was able to complete his degree in two years. Before long, he felt a familiar yearning to return to some form of public service. He found it in Teach for America, a national organization that recruits and trains college graduates to serve for two years in low-income urban and rural public schools.

Accepted into his first choice for the program, Pavel was hired as an English teacher at Detroit’s Denby High School, one of the city’s few schools included in Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority, a separate district outside the jurisdiction of Detroit Public Schools.

His first few weeks in the classroom were in many ways like his first military deployment, he says. But not for the reasons some might think.

Pavel in classroom

Ryan Pavel coaches his Denby High School students in the formal techniques of debate. (Photo by J.D. Booth.)

“I was underprepared for the experience,” says Pavel. “In Iraq, if you make a mistake in a translation, someone else might catch it and fix it. In the classroom, you’re making a permanent impact on students who are relying on you to get them to their next stage of life.”

Assigned to teach a drama class, Pavel improvised his way into discovering what his students actually wanted to gain from the experience. Ultimately he transformed the period into a debate class, joining a competitive inter-school league and coaching his students to a third-place finish—after getting trounced in their initial tournament.Now in his second year at Denby, Pavel can draw similarities to his second deployment in the military.

“I had done it before and I wasn’t going to be blindsided in year two,” he says. “It’s been infinitely better this year: better for my own peace of mind, and more importantly, better for my students. Their achievements are stacking up, particularly in debate.”

Meanwhile, Pavel remains a committed U-M alum with plans to bring to campus the Warrior-Scholar Project, first launched at Yale University in 2011 as a way to help veterans transition from combat to the classroom. Harvard also has a chapter, and U-M’s will be the third, thanks in large part to Pavel’s efforts.

When his two-year service with Teach for America ends, Pavel has plans for yet another mission in academia, where he hopes to further hone his public service skills.

“I’m looking at law school,” he says.

High up the list? Michigan.

Comments

  1. Scott Grannan

    I really enjoyed your story as it brought back many memories. I served in the USMC from 1961 – 67 and was an Arabic linguist and cryptanalyst. I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, probably in the same outfit as Ryan (2nd Radio), and spent my last year working at the NSA. I came to Ann Arbor hoping to go to the University but needed to earn some money first so worked a year as an AA police officer. When I applied to the University they turned me down since I’d gone to MSU for a year before the Marines and goofed off. I was finally admitted in summer 1968 and graduated in 1971 with a BA in math.

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  2. Frank (Dennis) Halsey - 1963

    To Scott Grannan: Are you the Scott Grannan with whom I studied Arabic (along with Lynn Torrance) at the Army Language School in 1962-63? I left class a little early in order to go to US Army Helicopter Flight School. Dennis (Frank) Halsey.

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