Okay, I'm going to waste my time commenting about another article on the Internet again.

This popped up in my yahoonews feed:

Mispronouncing Students' Names: A Slight That Can Cut Deep

The article linked to another article, an academic article, Teachers, please learn our names!: Racial Microagressions and the K-12 Classroom. Race, Ethnicity and Education, which used even stronger language, using words like  "racial microaggression" and "racism" repeatedly.

The purpose of these articles is to make you feel upset at all these terrible teachers who are mispronouncing students names.  But as I read them, all my sympathy went to the teachers.

During my time teaching English in Japan, Cambodia, and Vietnam, I've mispronounced hundreds of students' names.  

It was actually less of an issue in Japan.  The Japanese phonemes are, for the most part, relatively easy for a native English speaker to pronounce. 

There was, however, one exception--the Japanese liquid phoneme, which is difficult for English speakers to pronounce because it's somewhere halfway between an /l/ and an /r/.

The first name this sound became an issue on for me was "Ryoko."  The romanized spelling of her is only an approximation.  The actual sound of the "Ryo" syllable is unlike anything we have in English.

But I didn't realize that at first.  When I first met Ryoko, I pronounced her name with an English "Ryo" sound.

"No, no teacher.  It's Ryoko," she insisted.

"That's what I said.  Ryoko.  Right?"

"No Ryoko."

It sounded to me like exactly what I had said.  "Ryoko, right?"

"No, no Ryoko."

"Isn't that what I just said?  Ryoko?"

"Ryoko."

"Ryoko?"

"Ryo"

"Ryo"

Not only could I not pronounce it correctly, I couldn't even hear the difference between what I was saying and her corrections.

This is because of a well-known linguistic phenomenon called "acoustic filtering" in which people lose the ability in infancy to perceive sound contrasts that don't occur in their native language.  In the other direction, it's the same reason that Japanese and Korean speakers can't hear the difference between the English /l/ and /r/.  And it's the reason I couldn't hear any difference between my pronunciation, and the way Ryoko wanted her name pronounced.

Over the 8 years I was in Japan, I studied Japanese a lot, and although I never mastered pronunciation of the Japanese liquid consonant, I was eventually able to hear the difference between my pronunciation, and the Japanese pronunciation.

In Cambodia and Vietnam, I never even got that far.  I often still can't hear the difference between what my students want me to say, and what I think I'm saying:  

In Cambodia in particular this was a problem because I was teaching young students who were at a particularly vulnerable age (11-14).  If I mispronounced one of their names in a way that their classmates thought was particularly funny (for whatever reason), the rest of the class would leap on the mispronunciation, laugh about it, and tease that student.

I did my best but, once again, not only could I not pronounce a lot of these names, I couldn't even hear the difference between what I was saying and the students' corrections.  "But isn't that what I just said?" I would be constantly saying.

The students, being in an EFL setting, had limited contact with foreigners, and this was their first experience of a stupid foreigner horribly mispronouncing their name.  They couldn't understand why these phonemes, which were so simple for them, were always getting horribly mangled in my mouth.  Most of them laughed it off and said, "Whatever.  Just call me whatever."  But some of them got combative about it.  Or resentful.  Or sulky.

In return, my own name has been horribly mangled.  I have a name that ends in a dark l sound (W), which was impossible for the Japanese to pronounce.  (My name was "Joeru" in Japan) and appears to be very difficult for the Vietnamese and Cambodians to even perceive.  (Many Vietnamese and Cambodians have had a difficult time hearing the difference between "Joel" and "John", so I've grown used to just responding to "John" over here.)

Now in Vietnam and Cambodia, I'm in a monolingual classroom, where I only have to deal with the phonemes of one single language.  Pity the poor teacher back in the states, who's got to deal with multiple names from multiple countries.

I mean, look, I get it.  I feel bad for these poor kids.  It sucks being an immigrant.  It sucks being different when you're a teenager.
But if your name contains phonemes that do not occur in the English language, your teacher is probably going to mispronounce them.  And I know it sucks for these kids, but the poor teacher is doing the best they can most of the time.

This is, for better or for worse, the immigrant experience, and it's not just linked to racism.  Statistically speaking, most of the  white people in America come from backgrounds other than Anglo-Saxon.  And our Irish, German, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Welsh, Czech, Hungarian, Portuguese, Danish and Greek ancestors all had their names mispronounced as well.
My own surname (which has been an endless source of amusement to my Australian friends) is an Anglicized version of a Dutch surname that apparently was difficult for native English speakers to pronounce.

...Of course all that being said, I'm talking here only about phonemes that are difficult for native English speakers to perceive/produce.
If the teacher can pronounce the student's name correctly, but simply never bothers to learn it, then that's just plain lazy.  And if it's simply a matter of something like the sound/spelling correspondence not matching English expectations, than of course the teacher should learn the correct pronunciation.