The House System
The school is divided into four houses: Praeger (red), Grant (green), McAlester (blue), Speers (yellow). Two of the houses, Grant and Speers, were named after ex-headmasters of the school, whereas Praeger was named after the sculptress Rosamund Praeger and her brother Robert. McAlester was named after the Rev. McAlester who sat on the Committee of Sullivan Schools in the 1800s when the school was founded. The school's Preparatory Department, however, only contains three of the four houses - Grant house, which was established in the 1974-75 school year, only exists in the main body of the school.
Regular inter-house competitions are held to cultivate house pride - including the House Music Competition and Sports Day. In recent years Grant has dominated the House music event. McAlester has been successful in house rugby with Praeger dominating house hockey and winning the overall house cup in 2008. Speers has held a good record in badminton and tennis. The house cup has been hotly contested recently, particularly between Praeger and Speers.
In the school year ending June 2008, Praeger won by a mind-blowingly large margin.
In the school year beginning Sept 08 Grant won House Badminton.
On Tuesday 21 October 2008 was the latest House Music Competition, with Grant taking first place, followed extremely closely by McAlester, Praeger, and finally Speers. There are 7 categories for the House Music Competition; Ensemble, Junior Instrumental Solo, Senior Instrumental Solo, Vocal Solo, Composition, Pop Band and House Choir.
Having won the House Cup for the past three years in a row, Praeger is generally regarded as the most prestigious house, and pupils in this house can generally be told apart by their natural aura of brilliance.
Read more about this topic: Sullivan Upper School
Famous quotes containing the words house and/or system:
“In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father’s house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband’s is almost a cloister.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)