The holes just made the paddle look more scary and fierce for the sake of deterence.
Whether or not the paddle had holes didn’t effect the amount of pain delivered, it was all in the amount of depravity of the user. I got hit with a paddle with holes in it by a 6 ft. tall kindly assistant principal that stung a little and I been hit with a solid paddle by a 5ft 2 clinically insane nun in her sixties that almost crippled me for the day.
Does anyone know how to contact Mythbusters? I have an idea for the show. 
**Thank you! **That’s exactly the idea I was trying to get across, expressed a lot more clearly. The skin/flesh gets forcefully pressed into the holes and makes the blow more painful.
Kids used to sign the paddles in school back in West Goddamn, too, like other posters in this thread have mentioned. It actually seemed to be a source of pride or humor to some of them, and it definitely was for the teachers, many of whom were repressed, sadistic old bats with foul tempers and strong authoritarian tendencies.
There was also an even sicker wrinkle to the whole thing which occurred where some kid – usually a boy who had gotten a lot of ass-whoopings – would make a new paddle for a favored teacher and present it to her (our grade-school teachers were all female back then) at the end of the school year. I never could figure out where the hell that came from, but it was a fairly common occurrence.
I’m not sure I buy that (in other words, I think the holes may make a detectable difference to air resistance), but I don’t have any data/models either, other than knowing that I can feel the air resistance from swinging a 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of paper.
Can anyone put something solid on this?
No pun intended? 
The force due to drag is:
F = 1/2 rho[sub]air[/sub] v[sup]2[/sup] C[sub]d[/sub] A
where:
rho[sub]air[/sub] = 1 kg / m[sup]3[/sup]
v = 10 m/s (assumed)
C[sub]d[/sub] = 1.28 (flat plate perpendicular to flow)
A = .33 m * .10 m = .033 m[sup]2[/sup] (assumed)
F = 2.11 N = .47 pounds force.
ETA: Holes that subtracted half the cross sectional surface area would have half the drag, or 1 Newton (.25 lbs) difference. You can surely -feel- the drag on a piece of paper, but you’re putting in magnitudes higher force, so it’s not really going to slow you down any.
That’s what I had always heard, as well.
I was lucky and never got spanked in school, but I remember the thin paddles with holes in 'em and how most of the kids would rather have walked through fire than get a spanking from that evil thing. Notice I said most kids.
My mum used ping-pong paddles on me and HOLY SHIT did they hurt. I can’t imagine how much they’d hurt with holes in them too.
Bit like a Stuka dive bomber huh?
Beat me harder master:o
I went to High School back in the 70’s, and while we had the paddles with the holes in them, our teachers had a somewhat different slant on the general care and maintenance of diciplinary implements.
Ours were kept in a bucket of water.
Something tells me such a teacher today would suddenly discover a squad of police on his doorstep, who in turn would find a sizeable cache of child porn on his computer.
No skin, even in those days the swat was delivered to a clothed set of bottocks.
My guess for why holes hurt more: it’s the edges. The wood is smooth, except for the edges at the holes. If the edges were well-rounded, I don’t think it would hurt more.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
What is the legal basis for an adult to threaten or spank a child without violating laws against assault or battery? Do the laws give exemptions to parents or teachers for disciplinary use? Does the degree of injury (or lack of it) change things? Or, are laws just not enforced? The specifics would depend on state, I’m sure.
(This is GQ, please don’t let these factual questions lead to a debate.)
In my case, no. The first woman I remember looking at with lust in my heart was a Novice, Sister Marie, who taught music to my 3rd grade class. She was slim and blond and pretty. She was, maybe, 20 years old.
I was seated next to a kid named Mike who had about 9000 things wrong with him. To be brief, Mike was making noise and disrupting her class. She thought it was me and reprimanded me. He did it again and she beat me across the back and shoulders with a pointer until the pointer broke. Then she really went berserk because her pointer was broken.
I did not then, nor do I now, find being spanked or beaten the least bit sexually stimulating.
I won’t defend her, but I think I understand why she did it. That was still a day and age where she might have entered the Convent primarily from family pressure, rather than a personal desire to be a nun. Her beating me might well have been motivated at frustration and anger at feeling out of control about the direction her life was headed.
The holes are not about reducing area, they’re about giving the air a place to escape. Think of how it feels like to swing a ping pong raquet vs a tennis raquet.
Useless anecdote: I only got swatted once (in the 1970’s), by a male gym teacher. I was not required to pull down my pants… I would think the fabric of my clothing (pants or underwear) would prevent any “skin deformation”.
How common was it to have folks pull down their britches and bare their bum?
Also, he did not swat me with such a great force that I would believe that my skin would have done so, if I was barebottomed… interesting pattern to the blush-bruises perhaps, but I doubt there would have been any actual cellulite squeezing into the paddle holes.
My research area is in objects impacting on a free liquid surface and studying the air pockets that form underneath said objects. That air pocket is significant, at least above speeds of about 1m/s. So if the air holes did dissipate the air cushion that formed right before impact, they definitely could have some effect.
Now, if you’re wondering if a kid could actually feel the difference between the two? I doubt it.
When I went to parochial school in the 1960s, the Christian Brothers were masters of the paddle. One of the biggest troublemakers in my sixth grade class made it a habit of coming to school wearing two pairs of corduroy pants on days he expected to get a paddling.
Spanking? Please. Back in my day, when we acted up, the teacher would take us down to the metal shop and “polish” our fingers on the grinding wheel, and then make us sign the wheel in our own blood. We used to dream of being spanked.
What good does a spanking do? There’s no blinding pain, no chance of infection, no permanent damage; in a day or two, the misbehaving punk will be sitting comfortably again as if nothing had ever happened. That’s no way to teach him a lesson. Grind an inch or two off his fingers - that’s a lesson that’ll stick with him for the rest of his life. Out on the savannah, if you anger a lion, he doesn’t just spank you: he cripples you for life, and then you know better!
You’d be wrong in nearly half of the country, particularly the south. Corporal punishment is still permitted by law in 21 states.
We never had a paddle, we had The Strap:eek:
One of our teachers, and I suspect he was a perv, used to offer us a choice.
6 of the best with The Strap
or
500 lines.
We allus went for The Strap