Should teachers or students design summer projects? I would think the answer to this is quite obvious. Teachers should be the ones that design the summer projects. Students are not usually responsible enough to challenge themselves during the school year, much less summer vacation. I can understand wanting to give students a choice in what project they want to complete over the summer, but having them design the project is honestly not a good idea. It would be better if the teacher gave them options as to what project to do instead of having just one assignment for everyone. Students should not design their summer projects because they aren't mature enough yet and they would go easy on themselves.

These days teenagers aren't known for making the best decisions. They go with whatever is more fun for them at the time then what would be beneficial in the long run. For example the vaping epidemic. A large percentage of students have admitted to vaping on/off school grounds, even though they know it's detrimental to their health. It isn't because they don't value their lives or anything like that, but rather it's more fun to vape right now and just face the consequenses later in life. That behavior shows exactly the maturity level this generation is currently at. If you gave them free reign to design their own projects they would most definetely miss the point of why they have summer projects. They would make it really easy on themselves and not retain any of the knowledge that they had accumulated from the past year.

That leads me into my next point, which is that students aren't ready to challenge themselves yet. Very few students have the maturity level to understand the benefits of challenging yourself. They only see summer projects as the worst part of the summer. That's why if you let them design their own projects they would fail to create a good project. You may think that giving them the responsibility to design their own project would make them more mature, but in the end most teens just see it as free points for minimum effort. In college that would be a great plan for sure, but in high school and middle school I don't think so just yet.

In conclusion, students are not at the age to make their own projects because they haven't reached the mental maturity to challenge themselves. In college that would be a great plan to give students an interactive role in their learning, but for right now teachers should definetley take the reigns. They know exactly what we would benefit from learning over the summer, and they know exactly how to prepare us for the upcoming school year. In the future if the students that attend high school and middle school are more mature then by all means go ahead and let them design their own projects that might be a great idea, but until then I don't believe that is the greatest plan right now.