Yet when I got into high school they really tried hammering in Essays to the point where no one knew how to write a real story. You'd get people screwing up, bunching 5 lines of different characters speech into 1 paragraph because it was dealing with one point. People didn't seem to understand that in a piece of creative writing you don't need to have a point to every line as long as every line helps make a point.
I'm working on a novel right now, which coincidentally illustrates this point. My chapters are actually titled as the point of the entire chapter at the moment, here are a few: Casual Subterfuge, The Truth Unveiled and The Advent of (important character). The chapter titles will possibly change, but right now they're as useful as any writing plan I could make because if it isn't setting up later plots and it isn't advancing the plot arc of the chapter, then it gets ripped out.
The biggest thing I noticed in novels when in school was that some people butchered it with a preface. Most SF/F/H writers it's sometimes just a page saying thank you (normally to their spouse, agent and publisher - in that order) however a significant amount do this in the afterword. Yet when I picked up books I was assigned in school the preface took 5 pages describing the purpose of the book and I just thought that was cheap and lazy.