"I hate EBSCO"

My student Brian, very frustrated, said this to me yesterday as he was trying to find sources for his research assignment. Brian is angry about a few things right now. He has a crummy math teacher who doesn't teach, an art teacher who doesn't explain anything, and now there's EBSCO, which I think is the safety valve he can release. I know that I could have spent some time with him and suggested key words, but he was so worked up, I switched him over to Google Scholar, and we went through the whole keyword process he would have used in EBSCO and found a goodly number of scholarly articles. I also called up the math dept and set him up with an appointment to discuss his complaint, and he himself made an appointment to talk with the dean of his college, so I feel like he made some progress academically, even if he didn't use EBSCO to get there.a side note: the students, many of them, have taken to calling EBSCO, "ebesco." Very cute, i think. And the same day, many students showed me their EBSCO folders with new articles.