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RichardKennaway comments on Admit your ignorance - Less Wrong
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That would be a fault in the tutor or lecturer. No-one that I teach will lose my respect for revealing their ignorance or lack of understanding of something (nor for concealing it either). I listen and observe and try to say whatever I think will address their difficulty, and if it doesn't, try something else. And it sounds as if you act similarly in your teaching.
There are also issues around classmates. Even when I don't think I will lose the respect of my classmates for holding up the class until something is explained to my satisfaction, I do expect I will test their patience if it takes me an unusually long time to understand something. Certain concepts I just can't get on a first-pass explanation when put on the spot; it's almost always easier to pretend I understand it and then go home and study it.
Well thats certainly true, but from the perspective of undergraduate me it didn't seem that way. Admitting ignorance seemed to me like it would come with a loss of respect.
While teachers and lecturers certainly prefer their students to ask questions etc, I think plenty will also be consciously or unconsciously keeping a log of who seems to understand things more quickly and so on. While asking questions is what you're meant to do, and will almost always be of the greatest benefit to you as a student, the fear of losing respect isn't entirely unfounded.
I think it's very hard to be sure that you as a teacher are avoiding all judgement of this sort too, as avoiding all such judgement is both the sort of thing you professionally should be doing, and the sort of thing you'd like to think about yourself. As an academic judging someone's potential for postgrad, or a teacher assessing ability, it's very hard not to be swayed by an air of competence and ability in someone who seems to pick up ideas quickly and without difficulty.
This jives with my experience. Also, the grading I've done for various professors (and specifically the interaction that goes along with the grading) has exposed me to a lot of variations on the attitude of "officially, there are no stupid questions... but there are definitely stupid questions, and I'm tired of them." It's not ubiquitous, but it's common enough to make worrying about the prof's opinion pretty reasonable if you expect them to have any say in your future success beyond the grade you get in their class.