I am building a timeline of college course based on time of class and day of
class. I have been semi successful in coloring each row at the approximate
time of the class, but I am unable to associate those times with the specific
days.

The column before the start and stop times has the day(s) of classes which
need to match the day row at the top of the spreadsheet. Any help here would
be appreciated. Also the row of days is merged cells above the hourly times.

Hi,

Use this formula for conditional formatting:
=IF(TEXT(NOW(), "ddd") = C$2,
IF(AND(TIME(HOUR(NOW()),MINUTE(NOW()),SECOND(NOW() ))=$A3,
TIME(HOUR(NOW()),MINUTE(NOW()),SECOND(NOW()))<$B3) , 1, 0), 0)

In this formula
Column A is start time
Column B is the end time
Row 2 is the day

ie
C2 is today's date abbreviated to 3 characters
A3 is start time
B3 is end time

Hope that helped.

Shafiee.