“I have a distinct feeling that this young man is known to all his teachers to be a smart aleck who deliberately says provocative statements to elicit a response he can then blog about.”
Aside from your feeling do you have any evidence to substantiate your statement?
Again - even if this were true - students test teachers all the time. The teachers have a job to do and part of their job is classroom management. If you can’t handle the kids then you shouldn’t be teaching.
Handling kids is one thing. Handling their statements, which were actually solicited by administration walking into the classroom and telling the students that they should write up their teacher "if they say anything you don't like" and who were then coached to include the most damaging buzzwords in said statements, is another. That is exactly what goes on in many a NYC classroom while Bloombutt is running the school system. Using students as weapons to target the higher-priced veteran teachers who also have tenure, so they can be replaced by cheap newbie teachers who will not be granted tenure and who are quite willing to inflate their grades. That's a fine reward for decades of dedication to the art of teaching.