Summer break from schools has been a topic of consideration for a long time. Many people do not appreciate a summer break because they forget school material too easily throughout those few months of no school. Others say the break is beneficial due to the fact that students' minds are given a while to rest. Some schools have been combating the loss of knowledge over the summer by giving mandatory projects for students to complete over the summer. By doing this, they are assuring that the students do not forget too much and are still able to function well at the beginning of the next school year. The issue comes in on the differing ideas that these summer projects should be teacher-designed or student-designed. In the schools that require summer projects, the projects should be student-designed.

Schools have given summer breaks with the means of giving both teachers and students a rest. But due to such a large gap in between classes, students have often been observed to forget many things and therefore need lots of review at the beginning of school, which takes up lots of needed class time. If we spend lots of time reviewing at the beginning of each school year, the date for the end of school gets pushed farther into summer, therefore decreasing the amount of break. If students are given projects to design and complete over the summer, they will remember much more. Allowing students to design a project themselves gets them more involved with the material, thus causing them to learn more efficiently than in the classroom. When they are independent and outside of school, the willingness to complete a project would improve quite a bit, even if it is over their break. The end result of this would be that there would be less time taken up to review at the beginning of school, and new material would be presented much sooner, leading to an earlier end date for school, and, obviously, and longer summer break.

With a mandatory summer project that is teacher-designed, the teacher gets even less of a break. Instead of looking forward to the end of school and a nice, long break from the patience-draining teenagers, they have to worry about creating projects for all their students. Since they are already so tremendously busy, heaping yet another material requirement on their head would be unfair. They already do so much more work than the students, so why not make the students create their own projects? Many of my teachers have talked about how over breaks (like winter and spring break) they did lots of grading and planning for when school starts back up. Seeing as how winter and spring breaks would be the only good times to work on a summer project, they would have to be designing a project on top of grading and planning. Consequently, the teachers become more stressed and burdened, all the while not receiving an increase in their salary. Student-designed projects would allow teachers to not be as stressed, and allow them to have more of a break than they otherwise would.

Personally, I would enjoy having to design my own project for summer break. It would give me something more to do, and if it's designed by me, I would find it vastly more enjoyable than one created by the teacher. In my experience, I have quickly forgotten lots of school material in the span of summer break. Summer break is already a time in my life where I hardly do anything except a couple vacations and lounging around at home. If I had to design my project, my brain would be up and running and I would be finding much more to do. Instead of being sedentary, I could be furthering my knowledge in certain subjects so that I feel more prepared for the following school year. My imagination could also run more free than it normally does. Having to create something ourselves allows our minds to be more free and imaginative. Deep down, imagination is something we all crave, but it is suppressed quite often by requirements and rubrics. Minds young and old long to be free and not confined to what we are told we have to do or should do. Making us students design our own summer projects gives our minds wings and something to do.

A summer project is a good idea, but whether or not it should be designed by the student or by the teacher is still under thought. The benefits of having student-designed projects far outweigh those of having teacher-designed projects. Letting students make their own project allows them to increase their consumption of knowledge of different subjects because they are not sitting in a classroom and being talked to by a teacher. They can do what they want with that subject, making it more enjoyable for them and allowing them to remember more, thus decreasing the need to review for a couple of weeks at the beginning of every school year. Another benefit is that teachers would not have to be worked even more. They are already worked hard for so little pay, so they should not have to worry about creating even more material for students. A student-designed project allows the freedom of imagination. Schools preach the idea that they want students to be free of mind, yet they still have a multitude of confines. Many of us also do not do much during summer break, and if we are able to create something that we would enjoy completing, we would be quite a bit more occupied during the summer. We would be excited to go back to school and share what we learned or did over the summer. For these reasons, student-designed summer projects would be a much more beneficial and accepted form of education over the break.