The goal is to have the LDR move around by the servos and stop when its pointing at a light source strong enough to trigger it. My professor's instructions were a bit unclear, but by the way his provided base code works, the base servo moves a bit, waits for the top servo (with the LDR) to do a full sweep (0-180-0) and then increment another small degree. In which case I think the nested for loops are required.
Slipstick was right and the base servo was only moving 1 degree after every sweep and I just didn't see that, and after increasing the increment amount, I could see the movements working properly. I then added a while loop to stop the loop when the LDR sensor value was high enough, per the assignment's instructions.