text: 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.