Are you sitting in the front of the class? You would be less tempted to daydream or get off task if you are sitting in the front of the room.
Work on listening to your teachers and being totally engaged in learning. Relevance is a necessity. If you don’t know why you are being taught something, ask. Your assignments should have a purpose. Critical thinking, analytical thinking, identifying problems, solving problems, thinking creatively, developing an original thought or a good question… all of these thinking skills are much more important than “making good grades”. If you focus on grades, school will be boring. Focus on learning. Talk yourself into celebrating the “aha” moments. Your grades will improve and you will be a better student.
Read ahead of the lectures. Sure, you won’t understand it all, but after reading it, hearing the lecture and not getting some point, you are in great position to ask really helpful questions.
Obsessive note taking is bad. Studies of note taking have proven that it interferes with listening to (and therefore understanding) the lecture. The notes for a whole lecture might be 2 sentences or less (including none). Why note taking is still taught as a good study habit is beyond me. The best students pretty much don’t take notes at all. (One of the researchers of a report on this was on the Today show a few years back. Poor Katie Couric’s brain couldn’t get past the idea that here was an Ivy League professor telling her that note taking was bad. Her eyes just went crosseyed. Hilarious.)
If you are studying an d preparing for every quiz and still doing poorly, it sounds to me like you may need to readjust your “OK, I got it” point, that point where you say “OK, got this, time to ,move on to something different.” I would suggest that when you are studying for oyur next spainish quiz, studey to the point where you feel like you’ve “got it”, go do some thing else for half and hour, then come back and study for anothre 15 minutes.
Second, and this is very important: talk to your teachers! A.d be specific with them–descriibe to them HOW you study, and ask what you could be doing differently, don’t just ask for generic advice. They know best how to study for their tests, and they may well tell oyu that some of the stuff you do is actually useless and just sapping energy from the things you should be doing.