I've been getting a lot of emails about this so I'll post here in case
any one else is having issues.

11111. Create a file named .emacs in your home directory

Dr. Menzies directions instruct you to create a file in your home
directory named .emacs.  Files that begin with . are hidden files and
typically contain configurations for programs.  The .emacs file
contains configurations for emacs and will be loaded every time you
run emacs.

22222. Place (load  "/home/timm/etc/dotemacs.lisp") in the .emacs file
you made

By placing (load  "/home/timm/etc/dotemacs.lisp") in the .emacs file,
you're telling emacs to load a file from Dr. Menzies home directory.
The file you're loading ("dotemacs.lisp") contains the libraries
needed to run slime.

33333. Run emacs and slime

Once you've created the .emacs file and placed the line in it you can
run emacs and then run slime within emacs.

To do this run the following:

emacs
M-x slime

M-x is a key combination meaning you hit M (meta) then x.  M (meta) is
the ESC key and ALT if you have it enabled. Once you hit those two
keys, emacs will wait for you to type in what you want to run.  There
are tons of things you could run like tetris for example, but run
slime to enter the lisp repl.

Also, an easy way to make your .emacs file and insert the line on
shell would be to run this little command.

touch .emacs && echo "(load  \"/home/timm/etc/dotemacs.lisp\")"
> .emacs


Just adding some things to Andrew's post.

You don't need to implicitly do M-x slime on the start of emacs if you open a lisp file by default.

For example, the command "emacs file.lisp" would open two buffers in emacs upon startup; one for editing the file called "file.lisp" and the other buffer would have slime active. Slime sometimes takes a bit to load, so be patient. This only works if the file you're opening is a lisp file, I believe. It wouldn't make sense any other way.

If you don't open a file with the command, M-x is the way to go to open slime, though. To get the setup that Dr. Menzies has in class with the file buffer on top and slime on the bottom, just split the window in half using the keystrokes that are assigned to be put in "keystrokes.txt," and then change the bottom buffer to slime by clicking in the bottom buffer and using M-x slime.