The minds of pretenders

Retention, now there's a skill I don't have, and it's that concise and simple. I can't ever remember specifics, as in facts or data. Ideas work for me, but otherwise, even if my life depended on it, I could read a paragraph and would forget any pertinent details within minutes.
And really at this point it doesn't pose that big of a problem, but I lament that I never had the mental acuity to come up with statistical or specific events that might have enabled me to feel more confident in a classroom setting wherein I had an opinion but not enough evidence to back up what I was thinking. Now, if I could only remember the point I was trying to make.