Quote: "no good?"
Do not worry. The tutorial is basic, as you said. There are not many new Blender users here to try it.
If I was new to Blender, I would make a staircase very easily from your tutorial. You gave many useful hints.
Quote: "as this is my furst tutorial, any crits are greatly appreciated"
About the media:
Word documents are not the most portable. HTML and PDF use to be better, in my opinion.
About methods:
You did a good job with the red brush. Use bold and/or a different color for the hotkeys and important expressions such as "edit mode", "modifier" and "array".
Students love sample files. Well done.
Those hints are simple, but they do wonders to non-video tutorials. You know how students are these days.
Good job. Keep it up.
