Why waste time doing a project over the summer, that you had no part in deciding how it was designed? Summer, is a time of self enjoyment, and should be a break from school and doing boring assignments. However, teachers tend to assign students projects to do over the summer. With this in mind, many times teachers would assign projects that would take too much time and cause students to end up not doing it. This means, projects should be designed by students. At first, if students come up with their own projects, they can make it a reasonable amount of work where it does not stress them out to the point where they don't do it, but not terribly short and are able to finish it in 10 minutes. Next, having students design the project, allows them to control what they would like to learn and remember over the summer. Finally, giving students control, would increases the number of summer projects being completed.

First, procrastination is a very big problem on students. In countless cases, students in the Generic_City area, have a big summer project, and either do not know about it, or decide not to do it. For example, in the case of a student named Generic_Name, he had an English book report due over the summer. He was not informed by the teachers, so he never ended up doing it. This ended up causing him to start off at a lower grade the following year. If summer projects were student ran, he would have known that there was a summer project, and could of planned accordingly. In other cases, such as a student named Generic_Name, he knew about his English report by word of mouth, but decided not to do it because it was more work he felt the work load was overwhelming. If the students had designed the project, they could of made the project be a healthy amount of work that students know they could do it in a comfortable amount of time.

Next, one of the reasons on why student's tend to be very unprepared going into next year's class is, because they learn nothing from these projects. These projects that are given by teachers do not require them to learn anything to complete it. For example, a science teacher named Generic_Name, gave his students a big 20 page packet about rocks that he found online to do over the summer. He hopes this packet will teach them everything they need to know for the next year and get them ready. However, he is oblivious to his students taking advantage of this, and simply look up the answers online and be done with it. The whole point of the project would be wasted if students can just look up answers or copy it from a friend .The entire learning aspect from doing the project is negated. For example, if students could design it, they could have a project that would require students to find different types of rocks outside their home, take a picture of it ,and write a small description about it. This would accomplish the goal of a summer project. Giving students a way to learn about topics of the class in the summer, and disable the act to copy since everyone would have different types of pictures.

Finally, giving students the steering wheel for summer projects, would drastically increase the number of completed projects. A big reason why thousands of summer projects each year, were not being done, is because the students do not feel the project is worth their time. For example, why would you do a boring math packet over the summer, when you could just go to the beach and forget about it. Students have no emphasis on doing these projects. Now, if students had input on the project, they could make it something they seem worthy of doing, and put the time and effort into finishing it. This would help the students learn new information during the summer, and encourage more students to do the projects.

In conclusion, students should have control of summer projects and decide on how to do it. There are many reasons why this should be the case. Firstly, students can come up with projects that do not require them to stress about, and still actually finish them. Secondly, they could choose what they want to learn about over the summer, that way they don't waste the time copying their friends project and learn nothing. Lastly, the number completed projects would increase if students were given the creative license and control over their summer assignment.