Polish Natives Teaching English in Schools

So my wife teaches English to people of all ages, albeit at home. Multiple times a few of her pupils have mentioned the English they were taught at school is completely wrong, and how it's a good job they have a tutor as well. If they were minor mistakes I would understand but it's mainly the pronounciation the teachers have wrong, in a big way.

Lives as in "lives at home" is pronounced as "lifes"
Tongue is pronounced as "ton-goo"
Even my wife said she was taught to say certain words wrong, but luckily she was watching a lot of English-speaking television and could hear it correctly.

Has anyone else come across teachers in schools being this bad at teaching English?

My apologies if this is in the wrong section, but this is the only one I see it fitting.

All the time in Ukraine and Azerbaijan. Additionally, other teachers tell me that it is equally common in Russia (esp in the Central and Eastern Regions) and almost everywhere that you have teachers who learned English from books .

Not ALL the teachers of course, but this is not uncommon among students that come from local teachers. Aside from pronunciation, we also get words that have fallen out of use, less than perfect constructions and, as you point out, somethings that are out-right wrong.

Some of my favorites:

Clotheses - I want to buy new clotheses (they say clo-zez-ezes and other variations of an added -es/-s trying to make it plural).

I have heard the "lifes" you mentioned. Many are not understanding that there can be a short or long "i" depending on whether lives is a verb or a noun.

Pity - I pity for you. (Confused with sorry.)
Clever - He was very clever in all his university subjects. (Confused with smart.)
Delete - I deleted the potatoes since they were still raw. (Confused with remove and throw away.)

You will also hear words and phrases which have fallen out of use, particularly from American English, due to reading writers such as London. Twain, Dickens and Christie. Great authors but several of the words which were normal in their times have faded to obscurity.

Most anyone who has taught in Eastern Europe, the CIS and the FSU have examples like these.

Especially some of more descriptive adjectives in Conrad's novels. An average American graduate would need a dictionary on each page of any of his books and would like to replace those words that seem so weird with 'cool,wicked cool, *******', ******', and maybe three other ones. :)