Summer break. What comes to mind when you think about summer break? For students, that might mean a road trip with family, a trip with friends to a Caribbean island, or even sleeping the days away and occasionally waking up to eat and watch Netflix. The last thing on a students mind is school work. While it is vital for students to keep their knowledge intact with summer projects, this shouldn't take time away from having their summer break. If teachers were to design these projects with specific directions and interesting topics, students wouldn't have to waste time on a project that is most likely meaningless to them. Students should be given teacher-designed projects over the summer so that students take proper safety precautions, stay within the topic of the class, and don't spend too much time on a single project for one class.

Parents play a big part in these projects because they are the only ones there to make sure that safety is a top priority during the course of the project. Safety needs to be a big concern when students are given projects so that the teachers don't end up getting in trouble for something that they didn't have any control over. When given directions, students will follow them according to how they were stated to ensure they are scored properly after the project is completed and turned in. Students do very well on assignments when given directions and a rubric to follow because it gives them a standardization as to what the teacher is looking for in the assignment. If a student had too much freedom with the project, they wouldn't have these directions to follow, which could potentially lead to numerous disasters. Having the students follow certain protocols will help ensure that the student stays safe whether the project is as simple as handwriting an essay or as complex as creating chemical reactions.

A typical school schedule consists of four to eight different classes for every student. Now imagine what it is like to have that many different projects over summer break when a students time is supposed to be their own. When a student takes time to themselves, they often don't think about what is going to happen at school the next year or even anything relatively related to the topic of school. Having the teacher create a project will allow the student to stay on topic within the courses curriculum, restricting students to only learn the topics necessary for that specific course. This will keep all unnecessary topics and ideas out of the project to keep all assignments short and precise.

As a high school student myself, I know that it is very easy to over think something when not given rules, guidelines, or directions to follow. Students tend to over think things when given too much freedom which, in turn, leads to wasting valuable time that could've been used for another classes project or even just spending time with family and friends. When an assignment takes too much time, stress starts to be introduced into the picture. Students undergo enough stress during the regular school year already, and don't need to go through more over their time that is supposed to be used to take a break from school. Some may say that students need to learn time management and that having the freedom to choose their project will help them to gain experience with the important life skill. The weakness in this statement is that summer should not be spent worrying about projects that aren't supposed to take forever to complete. Yes, there should still be projects so that students don't lose what they learned in prior classes, but it shouldn't be a burden on the students time with family and friends over their summer break.

At the beginning of my high school experience, I was given a student-designed project with the task of figuring out what pH level E. coli bacteria grew best in. My instructor didn't give me any safety precautions or notices that I should have done something differently. Because of this, the chemicals that I was storing rotted away at the containers they were in, and ate away at the paint on my dresser. For this reason, I now take extra precaution when I'm working on a student-designed project because I don't want to be stuck in the same situation again. Not wasting time and keeping everyone happy and safe should always be taken into account when a student is given a teacher-designed project. Teacher-designed projects are, in the end, more beneficial for the student and for the teacher.