The key for me was making what I was reading about interesting to me and relevant to my life. If I am having trouble with a subject, I do a lot of research about it on the Internet, wandering around at will, until I hit upon things that make sense to me and connect with my life or interests. Sometimes I "ignore" the school readings or just skip around in them, preferring to get a larger picture by a whole lot more Internet research. Ask and answer your own questions, "imagine" what it was like to be someone living under "those" conditions (history, social science, etc.) See if you can tie two of your subjects together (write an English assignment about a history subject you are studying also) and put any "people" in their historic perspective, "ground" them. If you have science or math problems, see if you can make them concrete; write about them, draw their structures, model them, go outside and observe them, whatever you need to do to connect as many of your senses together to help your memory.