sharke

eph221
I had a hard time, because I started so young and my teachers taught me PATTERNS on the fretboard instead of learning the dots.  This was very confusing to me because I could see, for instance a pentatonic PATTERN on the fretboard, but it was divorced from any harmonic meaning.

That was the case with me too, although I never had any lessons. I picked stuff out from tutorials in guitar magazines, and from learning all the solos off "Kill Em All" note for note 
 
I still have a very pattern-centric view of the fretboard, as I'm sure most guitarists who improvise do. But when I learned to read music, what it did was take my focus away from fretboard patterns. It did this mainly because I was forced to stop looking at the fretboard while I was playing. Instead of looking at frets, I was now looking at notes on a stave. Learning pieces stopped being about learning shapes on the fretboard and more about remembering what the music looked like on paper. The upshot is that when I learn a piece from sight reading the music, I find it hard to remember how to play it without the music. Whereas when I learn a piece by ear, all of my usual muscle memory and pattern recognition kicks in.