Summer project assigments should be teacher designed and not designed by students. Most students cannot be trusted to choose a project design that would truly challenge them and help them learn the subject, and teachers are more well equipped to create a project format that is effective and user-friendly.

If summer projects were student designed, the project would be ineffective and students wouldn't learn as much from them as they would if teachers had assigned them. Students cannot be trusted to create something that would be challenging, and therefore a valuable learning eperience. Students would want to create a project that is easy to do and would result in the best grade for themselves, and cannot objectively prioritize their learning experience. If this was how projects were conducted, there would be no point in doing summer projects in the first place because nobody would learn from them. There would also be inconsistencies in the projects that everyone does, if they can create them indiiviually, students would have different assignments from each other and the grading would be biased. If the students had to come to the conclusion of one project designed together, they wouldn't be able to agree on one thing and each indiviual would want different things to be included in the project. In contrast, if things are designed by teachers, everyone gets the same project and it is not made with a bias towards what works better for one student compared to another. Teachers can be objective in their creation of a project so that it challenges everyone in some way. For example, my history teacher often designs projects in very different ways. For one unit, he will have an individual project that focuses on a complex and creative formatting to communciate the information learned in the unit. For the next unit, he will have a group project where people have assigned roles and have to execute specific actions and work together. These projects work well in a way that can only be thought out and executed by a teacher because they challenge students in the actual material of the subject, but also challenge them in their skills of formatting, public speaking, teamwork, and communications, which are valuable skills to learn in their own right. These are extra factors in a project that you woudn't get without the involvement of a teacher.

Teachers are also better at creating projects because they have more experience and knowledge with the concept. It is most likely that students have never had to create a project themselves before, so they wouldn't know where to start, what to include, how it should be graded, etc. Teachers have made many projects as apart of their jobs, and they know the design that tends to be more approachable for students, the material that seems to be the right level of difficulty, and how to grade it so that it is a proper evaluation of the student's abilities. Teachers are also well versed in the subject that they teach and would know the material that is most relevant and important to properly assess a student's understanding on. A student would have no guidance on what parts of the subject they learn is considered to be of highest value, and many projects are based on some of the most difficult concepts in the unit, so that a student is forced to spend more time with the ideas to gain a better understanding. Teachers are the ones who create the tests and quizzes that a student has to take on the material, and with this knowledge they know what students tend to struggle with and what parts of the unit should be focused on for an ideal learning experience.

One could argue that students should create their own projects because they would get better grades on them and it would be easier for them to understand, but this concept has too many factors of bias invovled and a student wouldn't be able to get a comepletely objective learning experience. If we only learned the things we wanted to learn, we would miss out on a lot of valuable skills in life and leanring experiences that help us with other subjects. If a student likes english, they can study literature and progress in that field, but they can only go so far if they only learn english without any teachings in history, math, or science. In the example of only learning literaure, there are many exmaple of historical references, scientific vocabularly, and mathematics in complex literature, and one cannot fully understand these works without a precursory knowledge in the other fields. Thus, projects cannot be student run just towards things they enjoy. Although it would be more enjoyable for the stundet to work on, it wouldn't be as effective educationally and there would be missing parts to the whole concept that need go be addressed.

There's a reason teachers are teachers and students are students. Students need to use their educational experience to focus purely on learning the subject at hand and useful skills for their lives. Teachers are there to help guide us to these goals, and this path is led astray when students start to do the jobs of teachers, and the effective system begins to fall apart. Educational experts are trained to know what they're doing, and it is our job to trust them and learn as much as we can.