Although the students being able to design their own summer project sounds great, it's better to leave it up to the teachers so that they can have all the required information, add an appropriate amount of work and properly introduce the subject for the following year. The idea of a student designing their own project is to give the student a little freedom. By allowing them to design it, teachers are able to see if students are capable of adding enough requirements based on what they've done on previous ones over the past years.

One of the main reasons why deciding to let the teachers create the summer projects would be a great idea is because the teacher would know how much information would be needed for when the students present in class. The presentation needs to have enough information so that the class can learn something from each students' project. That's how you know it's properly made is when the students can take something home from what they learned in school. I remember my freshman year of high school my class had to design their own project rubric and the class failed to add certain typical required tasks. The projects were not as informational as they were thought out to be and that led to the students being confused during the presentations.

Another reason why the teachers should probably be designing the summer projects is because they know the appropriate amount of work to give the students and when to lay back. Most of the time students don't want to do a lot of work and that's very understandable, but a lot of times nine out of the ten would try do as least work as possible. For example, in eighth grade I had a history teacher that allowed the students to create their own study guides, so knowing how lazy most of them were, they did the least amount of work as possible. The following class, we had our test on certain events that happened during the great depression and most of the students either failed or got a low grade due to the lack of work and information we had on our study guides. From then on the class was required to complete the study guides that were made by the teacher.

The third and final reason why it's better to have the teachers design summer projects is because the teacher is the only person that could properly introduce the subject. In the beginning of each year, teachers inform their students on how the class would run and how the assignments would be graded. I'd say all the teachers that I have had over the years but one, have properly introduced how the class would run and how the work would be presented. I had a history teacher in seventh grade that had an accent that I couldn't quite understand and I was clueless about where she might have been from. The first day of school was going well until I got to history, I had no idea what she was saying, she seemed very disorganized, and she was always forgetting what she wanted to get to for class. She wasn't very clear on how the work was going to be graded and she would have us take our own notes, which I don't mind but it didn't help that I couldn't understand her. I went the entire year guessing what she was saying and worried about what type of assignments i'd be getting.

Even though most students would prefer to design their own summer projects because of how much control they'd have on the work required or just simply wanting to do it themselves, it could be very beneficial for the students if teacher designed it for them. The teachers would be the best people to add in all the information needed for proper and factual presentations and they'd be able to balance the amount of work. Most importantly the teachers would be able to introduce the subject the best, for the students' to understand how assignments would be during the school year.