Summer assignments are the bane of any student's desire to enjoy the three months of freedom from school. However, they are critical in order to ensure that the student continues his or her education while not in school. With this in mind, these summer projects should be designed by the teacher to allow for more a more in-depth education about the subject when the school year starts up once again.

The point of summer projects, first and foremost, is to ensure that students gain or retain requisite knowledge for the course. This means that the student is trusted to enrich himself or herself with the required knowledge to complete the assignment. One example of such is the summer assignment required for AP Calculus BC at Generic_School. Students were required to complete a 16-page packet that covered all of the material that was covered the previous year: parametrics, polar coordinates and systems, limits, derivatives, applications of limits and derivatives, trigonometry, and so on. They were then expected to take a test on all of that material two weeks after the school year started up again. The purpose of this assignment was to ensure the student retained the requisite knowledge before progressing further into the school year. This meant that only two weeks were required to review the material from the previous year, allowing the class to progress at an accelerated rate because the students had already displayed mastery over the previous year's material.

Another example of a summer assignment ensuring that students gain necessary knowledge prior is the summer assignment for AP English Language and Composition. This assignment differs from the previous example in that it focused more on educating students on how to compose and analyze well-written pieces of literature. Students were required to read two books:

On Writing by Stephen King and

Educated by Tara Westover.

On Writing , a memoir about King's life and a guide on how to write, taught students about how to compose meaningful writing, covering aspects like cognizance of tone, diction, sentence and paragraph length, visual appeal of the text, conveying detail properly, and so on. Students were required to create a "writer's toolbox" just as King did in his book, listing out seven tips in King's memoir and seven additional tips that the student had learned from previous experience. Such tips included not beginning a sentence with a conjunction, weaving simple, compound, and complex sentences to make a piece of writing more appealing, creating a sound structure for an essay, and keeping the audience in mind when writing. Students were then required to apply those skills in analyzing the rhetorical choices of Tara Westover in her book,

Educated . Students chose two aspects of writing that they found from reading

On Writing and analyzed how Westover used those aspects to create her autobiography. This allowed students to learn how to analyze a piece of literature from a rhetorical perspective rather than a literary perspective. Because students had this introductory experience, they were able to conduct rhetorical analyses at a more in-depth level during the school year.

Summer assignments, annoying as they are, are definitely useful tools to give students the opportunity to establish foudational knowledge for a course they will be taking when the school year starts once again. As such, these projects should be designed by the teachers of the course so they can move at an accelerated rate or spend more time speaking about smaller details or more complex ideas within the course. A student would not be able to craft such assignments because summer plans, vacations, and other priorities would take precedence over further education. Thus, it falls upon the teacher to ensure that the required knowledge is gained for the course before the start of the school year.