Many schools require their students to complete a summer project during break to assure that they continue learning while not in school. Some are simple, such as writing an essay about events that happen over the summer, while others are long and grueling such as keeping a detailed log of every day, which is something one teachers from Generic_School had us do. Some students however, find teacher-designed assignments to be a chore and a struggle because they are not interesting or engaging. In order to fix this problem, I believe that summer projects should be student-designed because the students can choose topics that will interest them and engage them, and because the projects will feel more relevant and engaging to students in similar age groups.

By giving students the chance to choose their own project topic, it will insure that they will stay interested. For example, a few years ago, my band teacher sent us home before break with a project in which we would have to design our own marching band show and theme, the only restriction being that it had to be able to be performed in under eight minutes. Everyone in the class was super excited to begin right away and many of us began planning and researching almost immediately. The amount of freedom given to us by our teacher made the project thrilling and the possibilities were endless! When we all got back from break, it was obvious how much work everyone had put into their projects and how passionate they were about them. There were dozens themes ranging from classic Rock and Roll to Star Wars. By giving us the freedom to choose the themes of our projects, my band teacher found a way to engage us all in an educational and enjoyable experience.

Giving students the freedom to design their own projects also would insure that the project will be engaging and relevant to students in similar age groups. About a year ago, I went to a two-week engineering summer camp at a college I am interested in attending. There were students there from tenth through twelfth grade from all over the state, and the camp itself was actually run by a group of college students and a few professors. Over the course of the camp we learned all about engineering and future career fields we may be interested in, but we also were given an assignment. We had to design models of an Earth themed school in groups with the materials they provided before the end of the camp. To be honest, I had expected that we would have to take a test or fill out some questionnaire on what we had learned, given that we were at a college, so this was a nice surprise. Turns out that it was in fact the college students, and not the professors, who were in charge coming up with this project. Since they were not much older than us, they knew how to get us to apply the knowledge that we had learned in a way that we would enjoy. If all projects were done like this, I'm sure many of them would be of much higher quality than a teacher-designed project.

However, there are some benefits to doing a teacher-designed project rather than a student-designed one. For one thing, rules and guidelines would most likely be very clear. One year, one of my elementary school teachers decided to let us do our own summer projects based on the events of our summer, and we would have to show up next September to present it to the class in a creative way. Let's just say that things did not work out in the end. I was one of about five students to get an A on the project because either the other kids just wrote things down on a sheet of notebook paper because they didn't know what else to do, or they had forgotten all about the assignment over the break. If the teacher had decided to give us all a few options to pick from for the project, there would most likely have been more A's.

I do believe that there are real benefits in requiring students to complete projects over summer break, but I do wish that more teachers would give students more freedoms when it comes to selecting them. By using the students' input, students will be more interested in the assignment and will be more likely to complete them. If more teachers allowed students to select their own topics for these projects, the quality of the projects would most likely be better because it would be about something that the student was passionate about. If all teachers allowed more students to give suggestions and input into their lessons and projects, then the overall quality of schools and the desire to learn would increase.