Once the school year ends, students have a large break to look forward to: summer. These hard-worked students have time to unwind, relieve stress, and spend time with their loved ones. However, it is also imperative that students do some sort of school-related work in order to prevent the "summer slide," a loss of knowledge over the summer break if no schoolwork or unhelpful work is done. A question then arises: "Should these assignments be designed by the students or by the teachers?" Both sides have some very compelling supports to them, but one stands out above the other. Summer assignments should be designed by teachers because of the insurance that the students will have enough work to prevent summer slide, the easier access to studies to show the best options for assignments, and the fact that teacher-designed summer assignments are more traditional than student-designed work.

These may seem like some very strong points to support this side, but some people show aversion to teacher-designed assignments. This opposing side's main point is that students will know what students need and want to learn over the summer. While this may seem like a logical statement, teacher-designed assignments are just as student-centric as student-designed assignments. Many students enjoy the current trend of reading assignments over the summer, which is a teacher-designed assignment. Other assignments, such as mathematics problems or science-based work, are equally enjoyable, if not more so. For example, these science-based assignments often cover topics that have been shown to deeply interest students, such as observing aspects of nature for certain biology classes. Because of this student enjoyment, teacher-designed assignments are as good or more so than student-designed assignments, which proves the previous argument about students knowing what other students enjoy as misled.

Summer assignments should be designed by teachers because they ensure that students will have enough work for summer slide to not affect them. If these assignments are student-designed, they may not have enough work involved to prevent knowledge from leaking during the summer break. This is because students may feel sympathetic towards others and selfish towards themselves, thereby not giving enough or any work in order to only relax over the summer, not having to worry about any upcoming work. It may sound like a good idea to simply let students unwind without work, but summer slide is a serious problem, with many students over the course of the summer losing key facts that play a large role towards their future classes. One student, for example, failed to do any math-related assignments over a summer break. When he returned, he reported that he did not know many of the concepts required to do most of the work in his higher math class, even though these concepts were taught in the previous year. A teacher-designed assignment that keeps these concepts fresh in the mind would prevent this from happening, and they often do prevent this. They do this by using the next supporting point: easy access to studies that show the best assignments.

Teacher-designed assignments are superior to student-designed work because teachers have easy access to studies that show which assignments work to stop summer slide, and which ones do not. While many of these studies could be found via a quick internet search, teachers have entire volumes of these studies to look over, many of which cannot be accessed from the internet. When asked, one teacher stated, "Most of the work that we assign to students, whether it be over the school year or over the summer, has come from years and years of seeing what works and what doesn't, along with some testing to ensure that what we think works does in fact work. Right now, we have a pretty good understanding of what does." As stated, the testing (studies) has shown that modern teacher-designed assignments work to prevent summer slide. Student-designed assignments, on the other hand, do not have such access to these tests or these studies, so they may not know what will work and what will not. Another factor to consider when toying with the idea of student-led work is that, for the most part, people (and schools) are fairly averted to change.

Teacher-designed work should stay the norm for summer assignments because they are the norm, and many public bodies show aversion to change. This aversion mainly stems from the uncertainty about student work, as supported by the last two points supporting teacher-designed assignments. When performed, studies showed that much of the staff and students at schools preferred teacher-designed assignments due to their tried-and-true formula. Like the previous point, students may not know what to do for these assignments, while teachers have proven that they do know what to do. This aversion to change is also shown in other parts of school, such as the argued subject of changing paper-based learning to online-based learning. This subject has plenty of essays covering it on its own, but does show that people don't enjoy changing from a more traditional form of work to a form that has not proven its worth.

In conclusion, teacher-designed assignments should be used for summer work because they ensure that students will have enough work to do, they are supported by decades of work and studies, and they are more traditional than student-designed assignments. Summer work may seem like a chore to do because of summer's purported break from school. However, these assignments are crucial to doing well in school, and as proven before, teachers know best for these kinds of things. To support these teacher-designed assignments, go out and suggest that they should continue to be used to student bodies and school administrations. Summer slide can be stopped, and the evidence shows that teachers are the best source for ways to stop it.