It was the summer of 2017. I was sitting at my desk, staring at a packet titled "Algebra 2/ Trigonometry Summer Assignment". I had been staring at that packed for quite a while, debating whether or not I should put it off for another day. I mean, high school seemed pretty daunting enough and this packet only made it seem worse. A ton of questions were running through my head, the loudest of these screaming, "Why do I have to do this packet?" But, I buckled down and got my pencil, eraser, and calculator and began solving through the questions, one by one. Ironically, at the end, I realized how much of a help that summer assignment was. It not only refreshed my memory and knowledge on math, but it helped me prepare for the math class I was going to take freshmen year. Surprisingly enough, it was quite fun as well. All in all, looking back, I realized that learning and keeping your brain fresh over break is important. Summer assignments and summer projects designed by teachers are key for accomplishing this. However, an argument presented stated that these summer projects should be designed by students. Summer projects should be designed by teachers and not students because teachers can construct better stimulating projects, teachers can specifically tailor the project to the students' weak points, and can prevent students from designing their own unnecessary, irrational projects.

Teachers are more highly experienced than students in educating students which leads to better quality projects that stimulate a student's learning. Teachers are trained to educate students and help them achieve academic excellence. To do so, teachers use a variety of methods, one of them being, handing out summer projects. Because teachers do this on a much more frequent basis than students, the quality of a summer project is starkly better than that of a student. Not to mention, the time it would take a student versus a teacher to design a project. With the experience and maturity as a teacher, the easier and faster a teacher can come up with a quality summer project. It would be like the difference between a well-seasoned actor or actress versus a rookie delivering a message across the scene to the audience through their acting. Obviously, the well-seasoned, mature actor or actress will have more depth and quality in his or her acting. In the same way, because teachers are so experienced in this field, teachers would be able to construct in depth, stimulating summer projects while at the same time saving work, time, and errors.

Not only does experience as a teacher work in favor of designing the summer projects, but the relationship between the student and teacher helps the teacher to specifically tailor the project to a student's weak point. Knowing the student from the teacher's perspective involves knowing their weak spots and strong spots. This is exceedingly beneficial because if one class is particularly struggling with one topic, than the teacher can specifically tailor that project to help that class improve and learn more about that subject. Being a student, you do not hold a teacher's critical perspective or knowledge to judge and analyze in where you have your lows and highs. This may work as a blind spot in constructing a project that wouldn't pinpoint the topics you need to better improve on. Shortcomings from being a student play a significant role in why summer projects should be designed by teachers.

Allowing the teacher to design the summer projects also prevents the students from designing too easy, too hard, too weird, or too goofy projects. When you leave an important task, like letting the students make their own project, it can lead to some projects that are not geared toward learning and retaining information, but geared toward having fun or not meeting academic standards. As much as it is important to have fun doing this project, the entire purpose of a project is to learn. It may be argued the other way, in that letting students design their own summer projects should be allowed, since it allows for the students to be creative and go a little out of their box to construct a fun, creative, and learning project. However, taking this route contains too much room for the opportunity to go way out of the box. It allows for students to take advantage of this opportunity and miss out on the opportunity to truly give themselves a learning experience. Although it may encourage creativity, it is better to be safe in giving the students an uniform summer project that meets the expected standards, than to give students the opportunity to design one on their own that might exceed or not even meet the standards for learning.

Teacher-designed projects yield more better and concrete results than student-designed projects because of their professionalism, conciseness in one subject, and intention, which is why summer projects should always be designed by teachers. This way, education among the students can be uniformly preserved and kept fresh over breaks. Education should always be kept to a high standard in which this is accomplished through teachers, the founders and base of the education in America.