How to get students to class at 8:30 a.m.

One morning in the dark. Beep. Beep beep. Beep beep beep. Snooze. 5 minutes later snooze again. Cuddling the alarm clock that it can’t beep again. The second alarm clock rings that was hidden in the wooden cupboard only for the purpose to get out of my cosy bed. A little bit dizzy, but finally I am awake. Does that sound familiar to you?

One Tuesday morning, we had class at 8:30. Over half of the students either didn’t attend or arrived late. That must have been disappointing for a lecturer to sit in front of a few students that were still in a dream world with the only difference that their eyes were half open. Now what to do? Should she make students come to class by giving them bad grades otherwise, making them sing in front of the class or write 10 pages about why they should attend? No, there is a much better solution for it! She had the great idea of assigning a group of students to organize a breakfast the following week by using marketing strategies, and I was part of it.

Luckily, one of us had all the mobile phone numbers to create a WhatsApp group. What did we do? We...

• Talked about the breakfast itself;
• Discussed about several strategies to approach our target group;
• Sent WhatsApp messages constantly;
• Created a personal invitation about the free breakfast with a nice text, picture and colours;
• Sent more invitations via Twitter;
• Tagged people on the invitation at Facebook;
• Received confirmations;
• Bought food;
• Hoped that all people would come.

That Tuesday morning, almost everyone attended. Before we started to fill our empty stomachs, my group and I gave a presentation about how we used the marketing tools to get everyone to class at 8:30 a. m.

We had an almost typical Spanish breakfast with juices, milk, cocoa, fruits, cupcakes and other pastries. You can see the result below.

A standard Spanish breakfast, called desayuno, is the smallest meal of the day. That is the total opposite of the German breakfast “Frühstück” where it is said to “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper”. Speaking about Spanish adults, it is quite common to have “café con leche” – coffee with milk – and a sweet roll (with jam), slice of toast with butter, magdalenas (lemon flavoured cupcakes with no frosting) or sugary churros (fried-dough pastry mostly served with chocolate sauce or powdered sugar).

Churros with chocolate sauce:

And children use to drink hot or cold chocolate milk and eat cereals nowadays. By the way, how does a typical breakfast looks like in your country?

What have we learned today? If you ever ever become a lecturer and need to teach 8:30 a. m. classes, make students have their breakfast in the beginning of the class.

I'll keep you posted! ¡Adiós muchachos!

Photo gallery