I'm going into the 9th grade as well. But I've never really bothered to study any notes I took. I just crammed them into my binder and moved on to the next class when dismissed. I ended up graduating from the 8th grade with the highest EOC test scores for my history and science classes. I never really found the awards as something to be proud of since the US education system teaches to the lowest standard and utterly sucks.
But for how I learn, it depends on the teacher. If they're good at teaching, then I can easily remember the lessons from in-class without studying. But if the teacher is either boring/cannot teach properly, then I can't learn anything from them.
I remember having one language arts teacher who literally taught the class at a kindergarten level. All we ever did was read some of the most boring books you could ever find, play Scrabble, and take pointless notes. We had a "Power Teaching" chart for tracking merits/demerits for the class periods. I learned absolutely nothing from that class and every other student hated it. Everyone of her classes ended up failing the state writing exams.