Those classes probably turned off a sad number of would-be good writers from learning how to write creatively, efficiently, or even reasonably. I had exactly one English teacher who was reasonable and only taught to these abominable standards as required by the state but let real writing be rewarded in other assignments; he understood the reality of the language and that the point of your writing should be moreso effectively articulating ideas, effecting desired emotional responses, or provoking thoughts rather than some nonsense a committee at the Department of Education decided is proper and that legions of English teachers across the country take to heart as dogma and revel in the sadism of. Otherwise, throughout the years it was splitting hairs over prescriptivist grammatical minutiae, the aforementioned ridiculous essay structure, memorizing obsolete Shakespearen-era "vocabulary words" that no writer writing for a living audience would even consider using, and going on about how any grammatical structure or word that appeared after 1900 is objectively wrong.
I could have put much less effort into them than I did and still gotten As but I preferred to use them as an exercise in trying to work good writing around the myriad deeply-rooted problems in how I was forced to present it. That's the only bonus point I can give to it as a learning environment.
English classes in college have just been the same disappointment with a different mask on for the most part, except for exposure to real research methods, but still lag behind the real world in forcing you to use non-internet sources.
Was the experience different for you?