How to expose camera film properly?

I have a nikon Fe 35mm camera and i developed my negative the other day, some of the pictures came out but the others did not. My teacher said it was because I metered it wrong. But i don't know how to properly meter it and i'm confused on all the numbers on the meter scale! Please help I have another photo assignment tomorrow
-clueless

Admire you trying to solve this but I think you should review your course material

There's a manual here: http://www.butkus.org/chinon/nikon/nikon_fe/nikon_fe.htm (do slip him a few bucks via paypal)

Pay attention in class, and ask your teacher for assistance.

Camera meters tell you the correct exposure as if the subject were medium grey. Put a white piece of paper on the floor or wall and take a full-frame picture of it using the metered exposure. It will come out medium grey. Now do the same thing with a piece of black paper - it will also come out the exact same shade of grey.

You have to adjust your exposure up or down depending on the tone of the subject. If the subject is light-colored, you need to adjust your exposure up to prevent it from being under-exposed; if it's dark you need to adjust downwards to prevent it from being over-exposed. If the background is brighter than the subject (backlit) you need to make sure you're exposing for the subject and not the background.

Your FE has center weighted average metering, which means whatever is at the center of the frame counts more than the edges when determining exposure. One trick is to set your exposure by pointing the camera at something with a medium tone (not dark and not light), then set your exposure and recompose. Another option is to use an 18% grey card; these are pretty inexpensive. A hand-held incident light meter is fairly expensive, but will always give you the correct exposure if use it correctly. If you're photographing an average Caucasian, try shooting at +2/3 to +1 stop from the metered exposure on their skin.