or is that just a TV cliche
In my school, that was seen as a reward.
I vividly remember in grade school kids falling over themselves to be granted the task.
Yeah, competition for that job was fierce.
What is the sound of one eraser clapping?
It wasn’t punishment, but it was one of the chores that were rotated.
I HATED it. I liked to be outside, but what respiratory nightmare! Of course…maybe the problem was that I actually DID it, when I could have used the time for something fun.
Chores? No fun? Creating great billowing clouds of ‘smoke’ isn’t fun? Smacking them against the side of the building to make excusable graffiti isn’t fun? Chucking them at your best friend who got to do them for another teacher isn’t fun?
We were punished for clapping the erasers. Well, I was.
To be fair, it wasn’t authorized, and it was in the classroom, and made a huge mess.
Aw, I thought my school was special in that everyone loved to do those silly chores. Cleaning out the guinea pig cage was even considered a treat.
We use to take them outside and throw them against the wall so we could knock the chalk out without getting covered in the dust. We would try to make drawings on the wall of course.
It was absolutely not a punishment.
My school was another one where this was a reward/chore. It was a chore, but only the “teacher’s pets” 
got picked to do it. It was fun, while everyone else was stuck inside you and a buddy got to go outside without any adult supervision*.
*By which I mean standing directly in front off an all-glass door or window of the main office.
You got to go outside, by yourself, for the last few minutes of class, and beat defenseless erasers to death. What’s not to love?
I suppose if it were raining or 10 below zero outside it might have been used as a punishment, but I don’t recall my teachers inflicting that on anyone.
We loved doing that.
If I recall correctly, clapping erasers was a disciplinary offense.
Bumfuck northern california farm district - it was a punishment in the late 60’s. I cough cough had to do it more than once. Back in the day (1960’s), we didn’t have this tree hugging feel goody approach to edumacation. Chores needed doing, why make it a reward when you can much more easily penalize someone for an infraction…
I’m happy to report that these days, you don’t even have those fucking erasers what with white boards an all. 
Actually, I’m happier to report that at least in my affuent 'hood, teachers go out of their way on the positive, feel good approach.
The same as the other one clapping.
It was fun to do, for like the first one or two times, then it became a job
It wasn’t that fun at my parochial school, because you didn’t actually clap them. They had a machine, a vacuum with a rotating brush – looked like a miniature wood planer – you slid the erasers over it and it sucked the chalk dust into a cloth bag attached at the bottom.
The teachers still treated it as a special reward, giving it to special students, even though it wasn’t as much fun as clapping the erasers & making clouds of dust.
[Unless you secretly loosened the clamp holding the cloth bag onto the exhaust port, so it came off, and then you had a machine spewing flame-thrower like blasts of chalk dust out the back (at whoever happened to be where you had aimed the exhaust port). You didn’t really get in trouble for that – “it was an accident – the collection bag came off” – but you usually weren’t allowed to do it again for months. But it was worth it!]
Yes! I did the same thing.
We clapped them in my school. IIRC, it wasn’t a punishment, as has been noted by others.
We also had to sweep up the classroom after class.
Punishment was writing things 500 times on the blackboard, a la Bart Simpson. Yes, all these things really happened in my parochial school. Cliches get to be that way by being true, much of the time.