Soldering with lightning and other unfortunate uses of physics

Welding, more like hell-ding.

So, since most welding at your school is done with the aim of producing class welders, who can create perfect ISO-standard welds, a lot of the theory teaching of it is about how to set up your average arc welders, what to remember about the welding process, how to read WPS sheets, and then just... practice, practice, practice.

Problem is, I'm not gonna be a class welder, and I've only ever used a spot welder before (which is an entirely different principle than arc welding) and I can barely conceptualise the process of "melt metal, stick more metal in melt to make it thicker, let cool so it fuses" on paper. In practice, I literally have no idea how the molten metal in a weld pool behaves, or why welds are standardised a certain way, or how changing the various inputs that go into finished weld changes the features of said weld.

This is kind of a theme at school, and a part of the reason I don't like schools as learning environments. I always feel like the explanations aren't quite there -- they don't have much in way of theoretical basis and go only one level deep beyond "here is how you do this thing". In essence, we're taught how to do the thing, and how to control for factors that might affect our ability to do exactly as told, but not why we control for those factors, and no real understanding of the interplay of the factors.

I did finally figure it out, tho, I think. I just wish the physics of the various methods had been explained to me outright instead of leaving me to be like ????? all the way through the practicum and needing to read up on it on my own on my own time >:(