Summer break is every students dream; three whole months away from school. While students see this time period as a blessing teachers do not agree so much. Three months away from school equates to three whole months of time spent not learning about the core subjects. To combat this loss of learning, teachers provide students with summer projects to take home on work on while they are on their break. These are usually in the form of summer reading projects, but they can also be take home tests designed to keep students thinking about what they have learned in school. Summer projects always seem to have a flawed system of being very rigorous and demanding of students, despite them being on break from school. On top of this, summer projects lack in student cultural connection as teachers are not as kept up in student and teenage culture as they could be. Summer projects are always made by the teachers, however what if they were student-designed? Should these projects be designed by the student body or be given to the hands of the teachers? Summer projects should be designed by students because they will be more related to current student cultures, easier for students to comprehend, and require students to do less rigorous work.

To start off, summer projects should be designed by the students because they will relate more to current student culture. student culture changes rapidly, and what is relevant one day can be seen as old news the next day. For as invested as teachers can get in student culture, they most likely won't be able to keep up especially with the increase of technology which provides social media outlets to students. Because teachers can't keep up to well with student culture, they won't be able to provide creative assignments that include student culture which is also the fate of summer projects which are usually mundane and one-dimensional for students. A great example of a mundane summer project is the summer reading project. Students are told to choose one book, read the book, and answer they questions it asks. The books are almost always and old time classic and never relate to students as they have plots that go over the students heads. Having a student-designed summer project will help combat this problem of student culture as they know what books usually contain good content for students to enjoy. After all, they are also students. Keeping students connected with school and learning is an important part of a teachers job, and giving them bland summer reading projects is not a great way of doing so. Having students design a summer project for themselves will easily keep them connected with school.

Secondly, summer projects should be designed by students because they will be easier to comprehend. One problem with summer projects is that they can be confusing. They usually contain multiple steps with can contain multiple parts. It's easy to see why teachers do this which is to make sure students are being thorough with their work however it really is not necessary for students. Teachers have the curse of deep knowledge of a subject. Because of this, they often require every piece of information to fully understand a topic. Students don't have that much knowledge of a certain subject and instead understand from just a small frame work. For example, when adults spend money the question every small finance, from tax to coupons. Students, which are children, often go out and spend their money no questions asked. Yes, being aware of where the money goes is important, but that is important to adults who have much more responsibility then kids. The idea here is that having a simple summer project that is easy to understand is more beneficial to students, as they can understand with small frame work. Making confusing summer projects turns into tedious work, which is also another issue with summer projects.

Lastly, summer projects should be designed by students because they will be less rigorous work. Having a long summer project is not always beneficial to students as teachers may think. For example, while on summer break I got a summer reading project that asked for 20 quotes from the book that were interesting. When school came back around none of those 20 quotes were ever used in any lesson plan for the day. the quotes were just rigor work designed to keep students busy during the summer. Having a student-designed project will have students doing less work, while still keeping them interested in the project. Students can easily identify what is filler work and instead make work that will be used in some way by the teacher. Using the work that the students do over break and incorporating it into a lesson plan is a great way of teaching the students important concepts that they should always have memorized.

To sum up, having students design summer projects is a great idea because they'll be more related to student culture, be easier to understand by the students themselves, and require students to do less filler work. Of course, teachers and parents would say that having students design the project themelves is a bad idea as students will just make the project too easy, however the whole project development will be overseen by teachers and adults to make sure the projects are fair. That being said, schools should really give a chance to let students design their own summer projects. Teachers in general are not as connected to student body as the students themselves are. Giving students this chance to develop their own summer projects is a stellar idea and could put forth a lot of great projects with very creative outcomes.