What's Happening This Week -- February 6 - 12

February Classes 

Flight of the First -- Due by midnight POT 2/7

Headmistress Challenge #3 -- 2/9 -15

Quidditch Match #3 -- 2/9 - 3/2

OWLs -- 50% due 2/28

NEWTs --  75% due by 2/28

February Great Hall Treasure Hunt 

February Class Tetris Photo Contest -- Through 2/28

Missions --  Through 3/26

Ongoing:

Quidditch earburn sign-up

Class Tetris - Goals and Plans

Prefect's Challenge

Remembrall sign-up

Great Hall Badges

Last Week in the Common Room: Feb 5

Happy year of the rooster, everyone!

Lots of Happy Things, many of them involving food. Yum. 

New classes! So many new possibilities!

Pickle badges!!

A working knowledge of Harry Potter is helpful on trivia night.

Why aren't there more characters with more specific accents?

Geek of the Week -- Malala Yousafzai

Our Geek this week is famous not for being an educator, but for fighting for the right to be educated.

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani student who has become a leading advocate  for educational rights for girls and women.  She first rose to prominence at the age of 11 when she wrote a blog for  BBC Urdu describing daily life under the Taliban. Despite the fact that girls' schools had been closed and her family displaced by the fighting, she continued to study and speak out for the right of girls to be educated. 

Eventually the girls' schools were reopened, but Malala and her father persisted in their advocacy for educational access for girls. Their work won them much acclaim -- she was awarded Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize and other awards -- but it also earned them enemies in the Taliban. They received death threats, but when her father suggested they move or discontinue their campaigns for human rights, Malala refused.

The Taliban tried to make good on their threats in October, 2012. The then 15-year-old Malala was shot in the head on the way home from an exam. Though gravely wounded, she eventually recovered and continued to campaign on behalf of educational and womens' rights. She is the youngest person the be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (which she shared with Indian children's rights advocate Kailash Satyarthi) and has received numerous other awards for her work.

For her determination to get an education, even at the risk of her life, and her continuing campaign to guarantee all children everywhere the right to an education, Malala Yousafzai is a most worthy Ravenclaw Geek of the Week. 

Learn more about Malala Yousafzai:

http://www.biographyonline.net/women/malala.html
http://www.biography.com/people/malala-yousafzai-21362253#after-the-attack
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23241937

Photo credit: By DFID - UK Department for International Development - Malala Yousafzai: Education for girls, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44577822