During their summer vacation, students look forward to their time off of school and a break from the stress of their school work. However, often times, teachers provide students with an assignment to complete over the summer in order to ensure that they remain knowledgeable and don't forget what they worked so hard to learn during the school year. It is important that these summer assignments be teacher-designed because it guarantees that the students are reminded of what they really need to know, takes unnecessary stress off of students, and makes grading these assignments easier for the teachers.

It is better for students' summer assignments to be designed by their teacher to make sure that the students are practicing the information that they really need to know and not completing useless assignments. If given total freedom to create a project just for the sake of learning something, a student could be practicing skills that will not be useful to them in the coming school year, and waste their break on an assignment that will have no value on their future education. However, if given a structured assignment designed by teachers who know the curriculum and what students will need to carry with them into a new school year, the benefit of the assignment would enhance greatly and there would be no debate on whether or not the project was beneficial. In addition, some students may take their projects in very different directions and end up ahead or behind other students who didn't have the structure to be as successful as they could have been. This creates problems, not only for the students, but for the teachers who will start the year with a class of students at all different levels. To avoid this problem, the summer projects assigned should be created by teachers, rather than the students.

In addition, being given a set list of directions and expectation from their teacher would take stress off of many students who get lost with so much freedom. After all, it is their vacation, and while it is important that they continue to learn year-round, students should not have to stress over their school work during the break that they look forward to since the moment the school year starts. Many students, if told, "write a five paragraph essay about your favorite animal that incorporates two quotes and three different uses of commas", would be able to stick to that structure and hit every point of the assignment without any problem. On the other hand, if students were just simply told, "write and essay about anything you want", they get no sense of what their teacher is looking for and, again, could potentially write an essay that won't support what they should be practicing. All of this is to say, many students thrive with some sort of structure, which would only be provided if teachers created the project for their students to complete during the summer.

Lastly, if teachers were to design the summer projects for their students, it would undoubtedly make grading them easier. Starting off the beginning of the year with an assignment from every single student that needs to be graded is a struggle when paired with setting up a classroom, meeting all of their students, and establishing the rules and curriculum in their class. It would lift a burden off of not only the students, but the teachers as well. To speed up the process, it would be beneficial for teachers to grade different variations of the same assignment, rather than having to carefully check a mix of project to see if it meets their expectations. In order to make the lives of both parties a little bit easier, teachers should create the summer assignments for their students.

Why add to the stress and work load of both students and teachers by making students design their own summer project? Rather than benefiting students in a way that supports the goal of the assignment, to keep them reminded of what they need to remember in the future, it takes away unnecessary time from their well-deserved break. It just ends up doing more harm than good to both student and teachers, Luckily, there is an easy solution to this problem: make summer projects teacher-designed.