A hand held meter wont help you to make this decision. Basically all that happens when you take a reading with the meter (having set the ISO on the meter), is that a needle deflects in accordance with how you took the reading and where from. You then rotate a dial to line that needle up with either another needle or an index mark, which results in giving you a series of shutter speed and aperture combinations on two aligned scales all of which will give correct exposure, but it wont make the decision for you which to use. That comes down to if you want deep DOF -small aperture, shallow DOF -large aperture. You pick the shutter seed depending on how important that is to subject or camera movement with the particular shot.
Not to help you choose the right shutter speed and aperture combination David, that will always be your choice.
A meter will help you get a more accurate reading, but it's pretty useless unless you know how to use it, and one of the unfortunate things about the fantastic exposure systems in modern cameras, is that they've pretty well removed all incentive for newcomers to learn basic metering. I'll be honest, I have a meter but rarely use it, but I know by now the circumstances in which the camera metering is likely to let me down, which is more often than you may think, and I can compensate.
Clever as camera meters are, all they do is mix down all the tones on your focusing screen to 18% grey, which gives you perfect exposure for photographing ......18% grey cards. Thankfully, a lot of the scenes we photograph can be shot in that range, but not all by any means.
Try photographing a white sheet of paper which fills the frame and then a piece of black paper which fills the frame, you'll get two identical pictures of the same shade of grey because the metering just thinks "Ah 18% grey"
I'd have thought your course would cover this David, but my honest advice if you really want to get to grips with it, is get a book on the subject and sit down quietly and read it.
As gandhi says a meter would be useful and you could learn a lot from it but you really need to know how to use it.