This is Sparta! — Facebook prank or political statement?

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Test takers strike back. A funny thing happened at the annual mass grading of Advanced Placement English literature exams. The exclamation “This Is Sparta!” popped up daily in exam booklets.

At first I ignored it, but then a reader who teaches at the University of California at Irvine asked that our table keep track of the numbers, and I knew there was something to this phenomenon.

Lynda knew about the Facebook group, numbering more than 30,000, called “Everyone write ‘This is Sparta!’ on your AP tests.” Since we were reading nearly a million English Literature essays, “This is Sparta!” didn’t occur often, but all AP readers came to recognize it as the tag of a web-based network.

Instructions on Facebook are explicit: “In the middle of an essay randomly write the words THIS IS SPARTA! Draw a single line through what you just wrote.” Kevin, who started the group, knew AP graders are instructed not to count anything crossed out.

The goal was to cause graders to pause and chuckle at the cleverness of the prank. My observation of the AP Lit reading is that it did far more than that.

The phrase comes from a line in “300,” a 2007 film based on a graphic novel penned by Frank Miller. It narrates, with dubious historical accuracy, the 480 B.C. battle between 300 Greek Spartans and a million Persian invaders.

At the battle of Thermopylae, the Spartan king shouts, “This is Sparta!” as he rebuffs enemy threats and hurls Persian messengers into a pit of oblivion. Every last Spartan dies in the ensuing clash, but those defiant words have since become teen code for  “don’t tell us what to do.”

Greece, home of the first democracy, battling Persia, clearly mirrors current West/East political tensions, but the Facebook group seems to have no political motive.  The students in my classes who participated did it for the chuckle: “LOL, hahaha,” as they phrased it.

During the week of exam grading, readers exchanged sightings of the graffito; one table even erected a sign proclaiming, “This is Sparta!” But the most telling detail of this adolescent prank is the cautionary instruction to draw a single line through the sentence.

How defiant can 30,000 test takers be when they ask the reader to discount what they’ve written? It’s quite endearing that these teen “rebels” want to be sure their AP scores aren’t jeopardized--hardly a dramatic statement on the state of the world.

But as readers, we did adopt the Spartan spirit. In the Chief Reader’s last day speech, he encouraged 1100 teachers to grade the remaining hundred thousand essays by pumping his fist and shouting, “This is Sparta!”

We cheered and cheered, and went to our tables that final day to grade the remaining tests, hurling them into a concrete pit of oblivion--or perhaps into a metal computer scanner.

A Facebook prank with the modest goal of bringing a chuckle to the reading turned into a rallying cry to complete the daunting task on hand. We hundreds of Spartan readers tackled a million swarming essays and, unlike Spartans at Thermopylae, remained standing.

    “WE are Sparta!” LOL.

Erica Jacobs teaches at Oakton High School and George Mason University. Email her at ejacob1@gmu.edu.

     

   

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