text: If officials attempt to institute these projects in a school system that has previously had no summer assignments, the push back from students and their parents would be immense. The school board would receive hundreds of cliched complaints of summer being "students' time to relax" and so on. Letting students design their projects would ease the tension. There would still be a grandly negative response, but once students learned that they would be allowed to choose a topic of study, it would assuage at least many of them. To illustrate, any class I've been that's had to read a novel for school has hated doing so (I outline why in the previous paragraph). Assignments where students got to pick their own novel or choose between a group of novels, though, were received with less vitriol. While students still didn't like the idea of having to read for class, having the choice of what to read meant they were more willing to do it. Students don't want to be told how they'll be spending their summers. If they choose their projects, they'll have less of a sense of being mandated and it will be easier to institute this assignment.