Pre-Turkey Reflections

One of my little punk-ass guitar students floored me the other day. But first, I need to back up and get a running start. I began lessons with this 14 and a half year old mess a little over a year ago. Over the years, I've developed my own method of teaching kids with no intention of learning the play guitar other than to jam, which includes covert techniques of tricking them into learning some of the inner workings of music as well as an emphasis on improvising (which is first translated as "just screwing around for a little while every time you pick up the instrument). This kid exhibited NO evidence of talent (we'll save that discussion for another post - stay tuned) and on several occasions, I was ready to fire him and almost did.
Then all of a sudden, one day, after about 7 months of working with him weekly, everything came together - motor skills, rhythm (this was a big point, as for most of the time he had had none), interest, and a desire to want to do better on the instrument and actually have it be part of his life (as much of a commitment that a 15 year old boy can muster). So we continued through the summer.
The kid is Jewish, so we had a two month break during the high holy days in the early fall. We recently started back and early this week, at our lesson, I was fiddling around while he was setting up. Absent-mindedly, I played a Emaj7, voiced in the middle of the neck and he sprung to life.
"That's the chord from Under The Bridge," he says.
"Huh?"
"That's the chord from Under The Bridge," he says again, "Listen." He shuffles through his iPod to the Chili Peppers section and plays the intro for me (which brings me back to my senior prom in an instant - yes, that was actually the closing slow dance song that they played, can you believe that shit?) which ends on the same voicing of the Emaj7 that I had absent-mindedly produced.
Question mark.
So we did that a few more times, first with me playing chords and him identifying them as being from this song or that one, then with me playing open strings and seeing if he could identify them by name, which he could, for the most part, then finally with me playing pitches all over the neck, a lot of which, he could name with better than random accuracy. All this may sound unremarkable on the surface, but it was a major and unexpected occurrence for this kid.
This all plays into the ongoing struggle with pitch memory, aka "perfect pitch," which I have been desperately trying to add to my ability toolbox (if that were possible, which I'm not sure anymore if it is). For those of you updating your scorecard, I started this discussion during the summer, trying at first using anchors, (which a composer colleague of mine told me was dealing solely with relative pitch, not memory - don't know how I feel about that) then followed up with trying to associate the pitches with colors (synesthesia) or, like my student, with particular musical events (with decreasing degrees of success). All the while, I've been trying NOT to get into spirited discussion about it, as when I do, I sound like I'm making fun of people - like my wife - who can do what I, seemingly, cannot. My west-side blogger friend Michael Kaulkin brought up an interesting phenomena, where he thought his Sibelius software was secretly trying to usurp his inner hearing, and that led into a discussion with my wife and my sister (at whose house, I am eagerly awaiting that brined master piece which she just put in the oven) involving the following:
1) Just because I don't have perfect pitch, that doesn't mean that I'm a bad person (my sister said that, not me, and hell if I'm going to believe her).
2) One of the grating things about not having perfect pitch memory is that I have to start a new piece at the piano, not in my ears.
3) Only after having worked on a piece for a while, and subsequently having played through it several times, do I have all parts in my head, but I only have the relative pitches in my head - there is not guarantee that I am starting on the right pitch. Why is that a problem, she asked? It's a problem because the sonorities I want work in particular way (for voices, especially) in particular keys, and if I'm "hearing" in a different tonal understanding, I might think that it won't work the way I want it to, making me second guess, and likely try to change it, making only an excrutiating long process even longer.
As you can tell, this sort of a problem and speaks to the following very ugly question - should I even be doing this in the first place?
I'm sure my thinking will be far clearer with four pounds of turkey in my gut.