There are some KDE/hal bugs that prevent this from working automatically in KDE right now. However as long as you are a member of the 'plugdev' group (checked with a quick groups at the commmand line -- everyone in class should be...) it is easy to mount a flash drive via the terminal using the pmount (and pumount) command.
After inserting the flash drive run
$ dmesg ... usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning Vendor: USB 2.0 Model: Flash Disk Rev: 1100 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00 SCSI device sdb: 1981440 512-byte hdwr sectors (1014 MB) sdb: Write Protect is off sdb: Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00 sdb: assuming drive cache: write through SCSI device sdb: 1981440 512-byte hdwr sectors (1014 MB) sdb: Write Protect is off sdb: Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00 sdb: assuming drive cache: write through sdb: sdb1 $
This indicates that the usb drive is named /dev/sdb1. You can mount this by running
$ pmount /dev/sdb1
A directory will appear named /media/sdb1.
When you are finished, remember to run
$ pumount /dev/sdb1
or you may lose data.