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Today I got busy teaching my oldest kids all about trigonometry. You know, all that stuff about Sine and Cosine and the hypotenuse, a word that we learn how to spell first

Typical KS3 and GCSE books (i.e. for UK maths syllabus) dive straight into all those stuffy formula about SOH, CAH, TOA, if you can remember those little devils.

And devils they might well be, because when I ventured to the ‘do no evil’ oracle - i.e. Google - I found that the search string ‘teaching sine to kids’ returned pages of results about sins, as in the seven deadly ones.

I was left wondering which seven we were talking about, as I only remembered the three: sin, cos and tan, ignoring those pesky sideshows of secant and cotangent and friends. Envy wasn’t in the list and I can’t imagine it ever would be, not about trig surely.

Somehow or another, Google was determined to change my keyword ’sine’ into its contracted form ’sin’ with the resultant plethora of hits about how to teach sin to kids. Now, even that’s problematic. I can’t imagine that anyone would search ‘how to teach sin to kids,’ would they?

Dear priests of Google, I think that this it taking ‘do no evil’ a bit far.

Note to self: when teaching kids about mobiles, avoid the search - ‘teaching kids about the mob.’