For me, (rural PA, early 1990s) it was exactly that, but we had one teacher who was kind of into computers and they let him run--for grade 12 seniors only---a very, VERY basic programming class consisting of old (for the time) IBM PCs and UCSD Pascal. As the rest of the class was struggling to put the floppy disks in the right way, I spent the first week finishing up all of the year's worth of assignments so I could use the rest of the year to screw around and try to make games, write joke programs to mess with fellow students, etc. Fun class, got me excited about structured programming languages as opposed to BASIC, but pretty inadequate if your goal was to prepare future software engineers.