AITA for avoiding taking classes taught by professors with accents?

I agree with other people saying you may want to do deeper research - for example, my husband (and my son actually) have completely foreign sounding first (and last) names, but are 100% accent-free fluent in English. My husband learned it when he was 5 and my son is a native speaker. So, you can't always tell by name alone and may be missing out on good professors.

That being said, I TOTALLY know the frustration of not being able to understand a professor. I had a 7th grade teacher who was unintelligible to me - I didn't have hearing loss, but was completely unused to hearing accents, and my 7th grade accelerated Algebra class was NOT the place to start learning how to understand them lol. I didn't understand anything in that class, ever. I ended up doing so badly, that I was taken out of accelerated math (didn't make a good enough grade) and was in regular math for the rest of my secondary school career. Was it entirely because of the teacher's accent? Idk. Whatever the reason, I missed a lotttt of concepts that year and it set me back.

I will say that the dude had an American name and an American regional accent. Soooo yea.

/r/AmItheAsshole Thread Parent