I once heard someone say that the music one listens to their senior year of high school is the music that will tend to stick with them and essentially remain their favorite throughout the rest of their lives. If that's true, that probably makes me very biased because that's when i grew up (class of 1990) and all my top ten fave bands came out of or evolved from that era (with only one exception - but they sound like they could have come from that time anyway).
But even if i am a bit more pre-disposed to love 80's music because that was "my time" i still have to say it was the best. There was a lot of experimentation and creativity flowing through that period even from the artists that were the most commercial or mainstream. There's been such a noticable decline in really good and genuine recording artists (and also who gets airplay) since then - and you can check out the current thread on what if the Electric Mayhem played today's music to see how many people (younger and older) have a hard time seeing it since most of the hitmakers today are so flash in the pan or corporate entities.
Now brief history lesson from someone who's been there and lived through it - just like any other decade, you can't call all of 80's music great. It's not like once it was 1980 everything became brilliant and on Jan 1 1990 everything went downhill. But a lot of great stuff came pretty neatly during that timeline. However, around 1985/6, a lot of that brilliant experimentation was starting to give way to some cliches and by 87-89 there was a lot of horribly boring, stale, trite, formulaic, dull music reaching the top of the charts and there was more of a shift between "hit music" and more underground/college radio stuff which still remained great. Interestingly enough after the passage of time, it's pleasantly surprising to hear radio stations and other places playing and honoring "80s music" tends to not include a lot of the horrible late 80s cheesy "hits" stuff and favors some of the less "popular" at the time music. The best of the best managed to sift its way to the top of the group in retrospect even if it was more the stuff that subcultures were listening to instead of what was in the Top Ten when people are looking back at 80s music.
It's really quite funny because some of that stuff enjoys far more airplay on 80s nostalgia radio than it did when it was actually the 80s!
Of course, the videos were especially good because that was the dawn of the video age and when MTV and VH1 actually PLAYED music videos during the vast majority of its day. Artists don't really care much about making good videos anymore because it hardly seems worth it to spend the time/money if they don't end up shown anywhere! But yeah, i think it's awesome that teachers like yours are showing those 80s videos because that was such a huge part of the culture from a historical perspective and artistically the art form was at its height.