It is a common occurrence for teachers to assign work over the summer. There are many reasons for this, the most prominent being to keep students refreshed and ready for school and new classes after a long break. Many argue that the responsibility for the creation of these assignments should belong to the students, while others argue that the teachers should have the control in these assignments. The ones who should be responsible for the creation of these assignments is the teachers for a multitude of reasons, the main ones being that teachers have a better understanding of the next years content, they understand the skill level of the class as a whole much better than the students, and students can and will get lazy with assignment creation intending to slack off.

The purpose of school is for students to learn new things and gain a more advanced thinking process, the point of the summer assignments is to prepare students for the new things they will be learning. The implications of this are that, if students made these assignments, they would not be able to prepare themselves for the next year and for what they don't know about. On the other hand teachers have gone to specialized college classes to teach their respective subjects and have a much deeper understanding of what it is they have to teach. These qualities allow them to best determine what a student must know and remember for the next year, because a student who doesn't know physics can't properly prepare themselves for a physics class. Vice verse a teacher who has a degree in physics knows exactly what they want their students to know and remember when they enter their class.

Another reason in favor of having teachers create the summer assignments is the fact that they know their classes better than any singular student does. This ties in with how students don't know what is coming the next year in the way that the teacher has the most knowledge on what the class as a whole struggles on the most and therefore, can form assignments around this. While a group of friends can have knowledge on what each other struggles with they don't know about the rest of the class in the way teachers do. A teacher has access to all tests, quizzes, and basic assignments from their class, this information is not privy to the students and therefore a student can never truly understand what is needed in these assignments.

The final reason for summer assignment creation to be put in the hands of the student is the common laziness and apathy that many students face. One simple sounding solution to the problem above would be to have each individual student make their own assignment with a check done by the teacher. The problem with this is if an individual student is given the choice to make their own assignments many will choose something much easier than necessary and not get the proper education benefits from the assignment. Then, if everything about the assignment must be checked by the teacher anyways it only gives the illusion of choice. In actuality while the students may have different assignments from each other it is no different from the teacher just giving the students a more specialized assignment seeing as the teacher will make the changes to it they need anyways. Since this is not giving the students the true ability to make their own assignments the power is now in the teacher's hands. Therefore, if students are given true control of their assignments, they will always look for an easy way to increase their grade with the least effort, this is why teachers are given responsibility over the students. If responsibility was removed students wouldn't learn in school and assignments would almost never benefit the students.

In conclusion while there can be an argument for students creating assignments, if the choice must be black or white, the teachers should have the responsibility of creating summer assignments. The reasons being that teachers have more knowledge of a given subject and a deeper understanding of students, while the prevalence of apathy in students harms their case. While in actuality the best choice would be one of compromise in which both students and teachers get choice, the teachers should always have the majority of choice in the assigning of almost all work pertaining to school not just summer assignments, or else there is no purpose of school in the first place.