This is a common request, an eff ay cue. You can easily and quickly retain what you learn by linking each new fact to something you already know. Note similarities, parrallels, relations and differences. Note how a word or name might sound funny. Create a narrative about the new facts and things you already know. Eaxmple: Who was the first to calculate the size of the Earth? It was Eratosthenes, who, I suppose, didn't give a rats, or a toss, what people thought of his strange-sounding name. Eratosthenes was the head librarian at Alexandria, the sort of comfortable job you get if you're a genius in those days. Anyway, his method of determining the size of the Earth was to note the angle of the Sun at midday in Alexandria, and to find out the angle of the sun at midday in Athens 944km North-East of there, on the same day. With those two angles and the distance, he could calculate the radius of the Earth using (that thing some people hated in school) trigonometry. He was a friend of Archimedes (now, that's someone I know a lot about). The world was sparsely populated in classical Greek times, and there was no Internet or even a phone system, so Archimedes in Sicily and Eratosthenes in Alexandria had to write letters to each other in order to have an intelligent conversation with anyone and brag about what they'd discovered. Discoveries such as Eratosthenes famous "sieve," which he would use to fish for prime fishes in the harbour. That's how it is for geniuses. One particular letter from Archimedes described his secret "method of mechanics" that he used for solving geometry problems involving areas and volumes. It was as close to discovering calculus as anyone got before Newton and Leibniz two thousand years later. Eratosthenes was so impressed he added the letter to the library's collection, where scribes made copies of anything important (nearly two thousand years before the printing press) which is how we know about Archimedes method of mechanics.