In my undergrad EE, we had an elderly german prof who pronounced "quiescent" as "christian." Awesome professor, but half the class didn't take the initiative to understand (1) the meaning of the word or (2) it's true pronunciation. Could you imagine communicating with these people in industry?! It would've been maddening. </anecdote>
I recently had a math prof with a bit of an accent and also fairly bad handwriting. He always used the variables "u" and something that sounded like "wee", where "wee" was drawn kind of like a backwards uppercase "N" where the right hand tail didn't go all the way down to the baseline.
I realized about 5 weeks into the class that "wee" was actually just "v". :( I've had other profs with heavy accents before (that other people said they couldn't understand but I did alright with), but this prof just completely lost me on some words.
My Electronic Circuits professor pronounced 'threshold' as 's-ratio'. I didn't actually discover until after the semester in another class that there was something called a 'voltage threshold'.
I had a professor turn pivot into something close to pervert (pee-vert, to be precise). It was... distracting.
But I do understand how hard it is. I don't even know how long I confused the pronunciation of cheveux (hair) and chevaux (horses) and I used to butcher the pronunciation of l'eau (water; it sounds like 'low' not 'loo').
