Welcome ewernotme,
Here's hoping you enjoy your class. For large format and alternative process, you will be experimenting. I recommend that you find something black, something white and something in the middle gray. Put this in all your photographs, near the edge of the picture so it's out of the way and you can cut it out of the finished picture later.
Then no matter what else happens in your experiments, no matter what your teacher tells you or what you read about here about exposure and development and printing, you'll have some idea of something that should be black and white in the finished print.