I think that all people could agree that school is important. Learning is important. It is how humans grow and change through our lives. New things are learned every day, especially while in school. In school, we sit down for about seven hours a day to learn material provided and explained by teachers, for nine out of twelve months of each year. Summer projects, if assigned by a school, should be designed by the student, and not the teacher, in order for students to deepen interests and research topics that may not be provided in a school setting.

While schools continue to grow and change, and add new electives based off of future careers that interest many students, they can not have electives that will interest every student in the school. Electives such as tech ed, cooking courses, and cyber security are offered in my school, which help those students who would like to explore those career areas in the future, can only teach a limited amount of material and provide interests to only a limited number of students. A summer project created and designed by a student would have a completely unlimited amount of subjects that they could explore. Students would be able to create a project based off of something that they are truly interested in, or may already be good at.

By the time most students are getting ready to graduate high school, apply to colleges or pick their major for the the first time, they have no clue what to do because high school didn't provide them with the opportunity to explore many interests. It is a major flaw in the way that the education system works, especially in the United States, because we are taught the important subjects; such as math, which can be applied in many careers, science which is required for all medical careers and many more, history which is important to know, so that it doesn't repeat itself, and english, which once you get up to a certain point, only applies to a very limited number of professions. It would not help students to do yet another project based off of a subject they have years to sit in a classroom and learn about. Students should be able to explore what interests them, outside of those mandated subjects. A summer project where a student has freedom to learn what they desire to learn about could look like, a girl who wants to explore architecture and builds a small structure, or a boy who wants to be firefighter and decides to volunteer at his local fire station, which he might not have time for during the school year. It could also be a way for a student that has no clue in the world what they want to do, to learn about a carer so different from anything they have learned in school.

Summer is designed to be a break for students, I believe that most students would find it much less frustrating and more willing to do their best with a project, if they could do anything with it they wanted to. A project designed by the student would require much more imagination than a project with a rubric and instructions already provided by a teacher. Students would create something with passion and they would have desire more desire to learn if they could choose what it would be about.

Some may argue that a project with stricter learning guidelines and design guidelines created by a teacher would be more benefit that a project created by the student, but it is evident that students learn the way teachers would like us to learn for our entire school year. We learn our lessons the from the teacher and we take the tests created by the teacher who wrote our lessons. A project based off of a student's imagination would be very different from what a typical project designed by a teacher would look like, but it would be very different in the best way.