> A math course without a computer is not a modern math course.

Why does it have to be a modern math course and what part of elementary school math is "modern math"? Counting, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and even calculus are hundreds of years old.

> Humans are not going to advance the field, or even keep up to date, when it is insisted that students do everything their equally intelligent predecessors did plus new things.

I'm not saying don't use advanced technology, I'm saying you don't need advanced technology to learn anything from 1 + 1 = 2 through differential equations. It's a hindrance, not an asset.

> Something has got to go, and top of my list is a vast amount of pen and paper bullshit.

The idea that technology can solve everything is what needs to go. At some point people need to sit down and put the time and effort into learning. You can't automate and gamify everything.

I'm assuming you don't have experience with this sort of computer integration. It's just using web portals to give problems with varied values (so students don't all have the same answers) and grading. It changes little about the problems, except in that the websites can be extremely frustrating when the right answer is 0.2 and 1/5 is wrong (without asking for a decimal.) You're still solving manually, but the grading is automated.

I also tend to think you should know the underlying math before you apply it on a computer. It seems like you're just learning which buttons to click on the program without that underlying comprehension. I can't imagine trying to understand calculus without being grounded in algebra first.

Then again, maybe what I've described is just a learning weakness in me.

I'm familiar with the systems, I programmed one in high school. (Fortunately it didn't get used beyond some demos.) I liked Khan Academy's software when I looked at it years ago, though. But that's not what I mean by having a computer be a major part in the math classroom and ideally in homework, I was mainly addressing the weird idea of learning math with just pencil and paper. I was trying to remember a quote writing the last comment, found it now from http://theodoregray.com/BrainRot whose good first half (before the violent video games talk) is where I probably first developed the sentiment: "A math classroom without a computer is a joke."

Math builds on other math, and some amount of rote memorization and tedious by-hand work can sometimes be necessary to reach that 'aha!' moment where you understand the thing and its uses abstractly, and some of it can be useful to retain since you can do things by inspection. But so much could be cut. For instance, partial fraction expansion (mathematicians feel free to correct me) might just be wholely useless outside the group of people who enjoy such manual manipulation -- just have your computer do the inverse Laplace transform and get on with what you really want to do. Or have your computer do the expansion at the very least. More students could even reach the concept of Laplace transforms (my bet would be before high school) if they weren't slowed by so much tedium in earlier material.