Perfectly put. I'm having to take a VB.net course to advance to the next level of my high school's CS curriculum, if you could even call it that.
It's painful as hell, and like you said, makes me feel like a corporate monkey who's writing some ugly code for use in some specific pants-on-head retarded enterprise "app."
If you think that kind of work is retarded then don't get fooled by the languages and tools. A lot of the web stuff is just the same as VB. Just because its ruby or clojure doesn't take away from the fact that its just CRUD. Try and get into an interesting domain and don't worry too much about the language they use. Domain, domain, domain.
Don't get too discouraged by its corporate cooties. It's true that the language doesn't have a lot of sex appeal (no dialect of BASIC ever does), but it actually has a lot of cool stuff that's worth exploring. All told, you're actually pretty fortunate to be getting taught in one of the few languages a you might see in a high school curriculum that has decent support for interesting things like functional and asynchronous programming. All in all, VB.NET can take you a lot further than you might expect from its reputation among people who don't know it very well or are still sore about losing VB6.
It's painful as hell, and like you said, makes me feel like a corporate monkey who's writing some ugly code for use in some specific pants-on-head retarded enterprise "app."