Yep - I remember being told in 4th or 5th grade (which would be 1975ish) that we all had to learn the metric system because the country was converting.
I'm about the same age and went through the same education, although it was probably a bit earlier.
It did come in handy when taking science courses in high school. Everything we did was in metric, from chemistry to physics. I don't know if American high schools ever taught things like physics in English measurement in years prior, that must have been a nightmare.
And here we are 35 years later...