School just got out and the students finally have time to relax. They realize there is school later in the year, but forget about that, it's summer. In order to keep the students mentally sharp for the upcoming school year, they are given medial and mundane tasks over the summer to make sure they can continue to perform at the top of their game. Students often complain about how boring the assignment is, and they have a point;the summer assignments are often way too specific or require an immense amount of creativity to put together coherently. The task of summer projects is to continue learning even when school is out and thus the job to design the summer assignment should be in the hands of the teachers.

Although students would perform better if the summer assignment topic was something a little more relevant, the point is to learn and maintain a standard. If students could teach themselves, then there would be no purpose of going to school. A trend currently is the degradation of students and their worsening grades. If those same students were given the choice to either write a teacher's prompt or their own prompt, all of them would write a terrible paper. There would be no incentive to trying as the student can write about a topic that is nonsense and get away with it. Teachers direct and guide students to learning new things, and they set the standard for the years to come.

Students are fed up with school at the end of year, and now they have the free time to do anything they so wish. Their brains are not in the growing mindset;instead, they are thinking about the next parties or road trips. A student designing an assignment in their head might sound good to them, but in reality, it tends to turn out very poorly structured or lazily written. Students cannot be held accountable to remember every single detail of a particular class to be able to design an assignment especially in the midst of their summer fun.

The last reason that teachers should design summer assignments is grading them. They understand what the assignment should roughly be about. They know the differences of a terrible, average, or great paper. It would be impossible to fairly grade students if they all submit completely random and baseless papers that are not comparable to each other. The teacher should assign something that allows all the paper to have a consistent threat throughout the paper. Having all the students connected to a single topic helps prevent students from going off the rails on their assignment later on.

Overall, those that can teach in school should be able to design something to teach outside of school. Education is not about the satisfaction the student can derive from it, but the brutal reality of how well they can understand. With more students failing, it is the teacher's job to raise the bar and help those students work to get there. Lowering the bar creates a positive feed cycle;students will become worse and worse as the amount of effort required plummets. Teachers should design the assignments that best suit their students strengths.