How is the School Wide writing program supposed to help?

I am an 8th grade student and this year my school took on this new curriculum. I'm just wondering how it is supposed to help, because it has honestly made this the worst year of English class I have ever had. I literally learned nothing from the entire course, with the exception of of one statement, "A memoir is a true story where the author reflects on their memory," or something of that nature, I can't remember it exactly. That is really the only thing I remember from the entire year, which will end for me in 6 days. After all that time, we only wrote a persuasive essay and a memoir, and did annoying worksheets that were supposed to help us write the essays, but actually just wasted time. Seriously, these sheets asked horrible questions and it would have been better to just completely skip them. Also, those "writer's notebooks" were stupid. I don't mean to be rude, but that is really the only word to describe them, unless you have a more extreme word to say it. I want to know how this program was supposed to help, and I hope my teacher just did it wrong because it was not effective. I tried finding out myself, but as soon as I found out they call the program "Writing Fundamentals" I got extremely angry. How are the fundamentals of writing memoirs and persuasive essays? I think the fundamentals would be grammar, vocabulary, etc, and basically everything we didn't do this year. Instead of actually learning how to write, we just wrote. Who thought that would help? I know, we already have learned a lot of it in previous years, but really? My sister in her junior year of high school says she still does vocabulary. If that's the case, I should definitely be doing vocabulary. I guess I should wrap it up now, so how does is this curriculum supposed to help?