Often times, students disagree with and frown upon summer assignments, despite them helping to maintain their own educational growth. Many schools call for students to do projects over the summer to assure that they both have learned, and will continue to learn over the break. These summer projects should be designed by teachers, ensuring that: students actually learn something, students are being challenged, and that students' stress isn't piled up by them designing their own assignments.

Teacher designed summer projects are needed because, if actually completed, they guarantee that the student will retain new information. Although not over-break assignments, DECA projects, which are designed by DECA executives, have produced countless intelligent people that can solve real world problems with ease. DECA is a national organization in which peers compete against one another through the creation of business solutions projects. Many students who have participated in DECA and have solved these types of issues,either come out of secondary education feeling confident about economics, or actually go into the business field. Projects like these teach students how to use whatever they are learning, in a non-classroom environment, ultimately boosting student growth.

Assignments to be completed over the break are not meant to take away from the summer experience, but to challenge children enough to maintain and grow their educational ability. This purpose of summer assignments, is best suited by teacher modeling, because this presents a greater challenge to students. Some might argue that by students modeling their own projects, they are able to challenge themselves a great deal, without going over their personal limit. However, many young people will actually take advantage of being able to design their own assignments. For example, in my honors science classes, we would always have a year long, Science Symposium Assignment. In these assignments, me and a partner would design our own experiment and create a final trifold explaining the processes. Me and my partner always came up with the baseline knowledge experiments, so that we could earn a good grade without challenging ourselves. To this day, I do not recall the conclusions of those experiments, persuading me to believe if the teacher adminstered our project topics, we would have learned more.

Students who are assigned such large projects are typically already stressed about the fact that they have to complete the project. Allowing the students to design their own projects would greatly increase their stress levels as they now remotely have two seperate assignments. My father, who is in the Army Special Forces, was once faced with this issue. As the leader of his team, he was instructed to find out where they would carry out a home invasion and how they would carry out the invasion. Normally, he would have already been told where to do it, and would just have to figure out how to do it. This put a lot of stress on him at this time, and actually led to a failed mission because his stress levels trumped is intelligence. Having to design your own methods for carrying out an assignment is detrimental to the outcome, for all types of people, especially students.

Schools administering assignments similar to these, should be very cautious as to how they want the products to be done. It should definitley be made a priority that all projects are innovated by teachers in order to assure that the students are learning, reduce students' stress as much as possible, and to challenge and hold students accountable.