If your teachers and textbooks taught you that the theory of evolution addresses the origins of life as such, then you had inferior teachers and textbooks, I am sorry to say.
Could it be that their explanations have changed because their conclusions have been found to be incorrect?
In that case one would expect Darwin to address the question of life's origin in his 1859 classic The Origins of Species, no? Yet in my copy not one of the fourteen chapters deals with that.
That, IMO, is the problem. If you'd argue that species change/mutate within themselves, then I'd agree. But it's the idea that monkeys BECAME people (ie. one kind of DNA turning into another kind of DNA) that disproves Darwin's theory for me (and, I suspect, more and more scientists as more is learned about biology, DNA, etc).
Also, I can't quote the source, but I remember reading some time in the past year or so that Darwin returned to his "Christian" roots and rejected his earlier positions on his deathbed. (More food-for-thought-and-conversation!)