Are summer assignments really fitting what a student needs best? Summer assignments consist of work that the students are requested to complete before returning to school at the end of summer. These assignments are created to ensure that the students continue learning during their break and is a great way to help the students excel in what they learned, while not being at school. There is an on-going debate whether or not these assignments should be teacher-designed or student-designed. Summer assignments should in fact be teacher-designed, as it maintains the teachers standards for learning, grants the student prior knowledge for the upcoming year, and enables equal work for the students.

Some may argue that having summer assignments that are teacher-designed will be repetitive, not focusing on the students weak points. Though this may be true, it is easily avoided. Teachers can diminish this issue by meeting with the student prior to the school years end to discuss the topics that students needs more or less work on. This would eliminate repetitiveness and cause the student to become stronger in the topics he or she is weak at.

Summer assignments are a great way for students to not loose the knowledge they learned in the past year while learning new things that he or she may see in the future. These assignments should be teacher-designed to help maintain his or her standards. Without doing this, students would just design their summer assignments to require less overall work, having a more negative affect on the student. Maintaining the teachers standards would allow the teacher to assign the topics he or she feels is necessary for the student to learn and is not too easy or unnecessary. Maintaining the teachers learning standards goes along with giving the student prior knowledge as to what they might expect in the future.

Teachers have the best knowledge of what students will be learning in the upcoming year. This is a key argument to the claim that summer assignments should be student-designed. If summer work is planned out by students, they will not learn about topics they may see in the future. Having teachers design the summer work will allow them to include a sneak-peak as to what they may see in the year to come. This is very important as it gives the students an advantage when starting their new school year. Teacher-designed summer assignments would not just give the students insight into their upcoming school year, but also enable equal work between the students.

Students work very hard over the long school year. Teachers try their best to allow equal work for the students so that one student is not given more work than the other. Some students may not need as much work in a certain topic compared to others. Teachers will most likely assign said student different work from the others as it may be unnecessary for that student to focus on a topic they have already mastered. This often creates conflict between the students, arguing that they have more work than others. Teachers can attack this issue by working with the student to find out what best fits the students capabilities. A great way to do this is to give the students work based on what they need to improve on, but making the time it takes to finish the assignments equal. Examples of this include: giving the students that only needs to focus on one topic much more work in that topic and giving the students that need work on more than one topic a more widespread list of topics, but still maintaining equal time it takes to finish all of the work.

In conclusion, summer assignments should indeed be teacher-designed to enable the teachers standards for learning, prior knowledge for the upcoming year, and equal work among the students. This is a very important topic and should be discussed thoroughly when in the topic of summer assignments. I urge you to take this into consideration next time this discussion is brought up in your school or community.