I also learned to solder at school with the thing we're talking about thrust into the heap of clinkers heated with a gas torch.

The first thing the metal work teacher got us to make was a tin-plate tray. This involved cutting a V out of each corner of a square of tin-plate, folding it up slightly and running solder into the mating of the edges to make the tray.

Unfortunately, I never managed to cut the Vs accurately, and ended up trying to solder across a gap after bemnding the cut outs back and forth to break them.

After about six months the other kids were making hasps and staples, or paint scrapers, milling stuff on the milling machine, and I was still trying to get solder to bridge a one millimetre gap :-)