Absolutely common in my era. Our Phy-ed teacher gave us "the paddle" for various offenses. They were hard, very accurate swats with, like a bread/meat board with a handle, administered by our 6'3 320lb Phy-Ed teacher/Football Coach. They were administered in your underwear until you reached a certain criteria or offense. Now your first paddle, providing it wasn't a ridiculous offense or several accrude the same day was firm enough to make you not want another, but not like your 2nd and continous paddles which brought many a boy to tears. They were administered hard enough to give a "bullseye" a red circle on each cheek with a white circle in the middle of the red. Bare-Ass Paddles: Your 10th Paddle and all Paddles after your 10th were bare-assed, and much harder each time.
The offenses ranged from not showering after P.E. to Swearing to
things like, apparently breaking the ceramic drinking water fountain with a volleyball whilst playing the best game in P.E. BATTLEBALL! is worthy of much admiration, and a Bare-Ass Paddle, and being the first and only to do it, the new one was dubbed "Jed" (not my real name), as the rumor for a decade was that my parents had to pay for a new one.
Slamming a ball to the floor causing it to rise higher than your head on the bounce when you were "out" during Battleball, was worth a normal underwear paddle, unless the ball made it to the metal trusses in the ceiling, which was cause for a bare-ass paddle. I never really gave two craps about the paddles, no matter how many I got, bare-assed or not, although three bare-assed paddles in a row was cause for grimacing while seated for the next few classes. I hold the record for the most paddles ever given in one year at my school (37) and anyone over 10 got to sign the paddle. The practise was banned after a kid from a large suburb moved to our hick town, received a paddle for refusing to shower after Phy-Ed and the school was sued for sexual harassment, corporal punishment, and mental anguish.
At home bare-assed spankings were had for things that really pissed my mother off, or her friend Judy, who loved to hit me in the bare ass with a flyswatter when she thought my mom was not doing a good enough job. My dad gave me a few bare ass spankings but he was usually more physical than a spanking if you get what I'm saying. These all stopped once I was old enough to physically stop them from happening. With a mother who was 5'1 115lbs it didn't take much. My dad, that is another story. He slammed me against the ceiling in our garage when I was 18 years old. I weighed 165lbs and he had no issue picking me up by the shoulders and slamming my back against the ceiling. This ended about a month later, (after graduating) we got into an argument, we crashed on a coffee table in the struggle, breaking it. My mom told my dad to grab me, I walked outside, dad followed, a tussle ensued, I warned him to just let me leave, he tried to grab me, I punched him in the eye, broke blood vessels in his eye, gave him a horrible black eye, and that was that except for the guilt I had for hitting my dad...