I had this problem too. When I was young the subjects I had on a particular year were.. distasteful for the version of me in that year. But now in my 30s I figured out that it was because of misalignment in interest based on my age.
Tl; Dr -
- Top-Down approach - skim through the text at a brisk pace and capture the high level themes of each section/paragraph. Then drill down deeper for the second time. Repeat until you are familiar with the topic.
- Change perspectives - Imagine you are the person solving a problem in history when some problem/event happened. Works well to pur yourself in somebody else's shoes. Especially useful "unlearning" a lot of things we take for granted in the modern age.
- Try to study a subject from multiple sources: Lecture videos from other schools, different professors, different books, summaries from AI.
The main problem is the material needs to be presented to you in a way that aligns with your thought process and frame of mind at a specific point in time.
Expecting a young person to change perspective is very hard: They have a hard time having ONE consistent perspective.. let alone multiple based on the subject at hand. However it's too important to suggest alternatives.
Let's take physics. Try to understand at a high level what the problem statement is and why people invented the math to understand the physical phenomenon they were trying to understand and describe.
Latin: Generally for language it's important to practice speaking and listening to get familiar quickly. Unfortunately for languages like this which is not spoken widely nowadays you have to rely on reading history and associate the language to it somehow.