Exploring "The All of It" from the 2025 AP Lit Exam

There are occasionally released items on the AP Exam that cause a teacher to immediately think, Well I did all that I could. This thought is often quickly followed in my mind with, Bless the people assigned this prompt at the reading.

However, in other instances, some passages truly resonate with students and teachers, so much so that they become integral parts of classrooms for years to come. In 2023, I had a student who was moved so deeply during the AP Exam that she wept while reading “The Rock Eaters” passage. Each August, I teach the coming-of-age selection from Johnny Got His Gun, and as we conclude class, I always have seniors say that they cannot wait to go home and hug their parents.

I know that excerpt from The All of It by Jeannette Haien will be a passage I look forward to teaching each year. Father Declan’s inner dialogue as he drives home from a fishing trip is incredibly poignant and rich with entry points for students to access the complexity in the passage. The best essays over this excerpt explored the tension between Father Declan’s current life, the life he might have had, the life society expects him to have, and the life he dares to dream about for a brief moment. His “mere wish” of a wish is to own a little dog to provide him with companionship and affection. Unfortunately, Father Declan is crippled by indecision, the pressures of his calling, and the expectations of others. Before we read the passage, I plan to ask students to journal briefly: What is expected of you? What do you expect of yourself? What would you do with your life if you had no one to live for but yourself?

I think this piece lends itself well to a strategy we use to explore dualities in a text. Drawing a T-Chart, I ask students to find what are the opposing forces or different tensions in the passage that create duality in the text. The duality strategy asks students to explore the ever important idea (both for literature and real life) that two things can be true at once. At first, students struggle to come up with answers beyond the superficial. Here, I imagine students will quickly recognize that Father Declan is simultaneously battling feelings of excitement from his successful fishing trip and crippling loneliness as he has no one with which to share his joy.

Questions I plan to ask to push students deeper into the dualities of the passage include:

• What is Father Declan’s reality? What does he wish his life might be?
• What is missing from his life? What is keeping him from following his wishes?
• Who are the Mrs. Duggin’s of the world? Who (or what) do these people oppose?
• What rules govern Father Declan’s existence? To what extent are these rules genuine obstacles to his goals?
• What does society expect of Father Declan? What does Father Declan dream of for himself?
• How does the setting align with his character’s contemplation? What is in opposition to the physical setting?

Using the shifts in the passage, students could select two of these dualities and organize their essay around the warring tensions inside of Father Declan. I think this passage would help students find access points in other texts where the central conflict is between society’s expectations and a person’s hidden desires. I am excited to travel through this piece with my students as they undoubtedly grapple with multiple, simultaneous, (and often conflicting) expectations from without and within.