Maybe I can help on some of this.
1: Type in user name and password. Should be simple enough. Remember, BOTH are usually case sensitive. It has to match perfectly or it will not accept it.
2,3,4: Link to a page that talks about all this.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-tip-prompt/5: cd /home/student
6: mkdir yourname
7: ls yourname That is a lower case version of LS. It's short for list.
7a: you could also just do a ls too.
8: cd yourname
9: Not sure what they mean. The ls command prints it to screen. If they want it printed to a printer on paper, can't remember off the top of my head. It's been a while since I did that. lol
10: touch classes.txt
11: Depends on editors installed. Could be vi, nano or some other editor. It would go something like this: command <file name> Example: nano classes.txt OR vi classes.txt
If you are using vi, you better practice a bit because vi takes some getting used to. I hope you have plenty of hair to pull out if it just doesn't click for you. Some people can use it right from the start like a pro and some can't use it even after years of having too. I fall into the later one. I just can't get vi to work for me. I use nano instead.
12: cd /
13: cat /home/student/classes.txt
14: Depends as I think it can vary from distro to distro.
15: What happened to 15?
16: You need to read up on the find command. I use the GUI version. You may not have that on yours.
17: Same as above. Plus where to look can vary on distros too. It's usually in /usr somewhere. Mine is in /usr/share/man/man1/ but that can vary. I think it used to be in /usr/doc or something a good while back. May even depend on the distro too.
Another tip. Most systems have a thing called tab completion. Let's say you are on the command line trying to recall a command. If you know the first few letters, you can type them in then hit tab twice. It will list all the matching commands. Let's say the command is abcdefghijklmn. Well, that is a bit long and unique. Just type in abcd then hit tab twice. If there is no other command that starts with abcd then it will fill in the rest. If there are other commands that start with abcd, then it will list them all and you can pick from the list.
Hope that helps. I feel like I went back to school. lol