I recall one of my best math class grades was pre-cal my Junior year. I would normally fall into the trap you did, and completely failed Algebra 2 but somehow didn't swing back on it..
Anyway, the teacher, the girls soccer couch, actually gave us a good amount of time after the lecturing to work on our homework. And often he would start the class about 10-15 minutes late and I knew it was to give us a chance to polish off the homework. I recall being in a class of mostly Seniors, and a group of us always ended up working together.. The baseball teams pitcher, who was actually quite sharp, his friend, and a girl I don't quite remember that well. The teacher encouraged us to move our desks together as needed. This arrangement worked out fantastically. We would often divide and conquer the homework, or race through the problems individually. Both had advantages; somebody(me or the pitcher) would almost always have a particular problem figured out if the rest were stuck. It created this interaction that was part competitive and part cooperative/supportive. I suspect we all had fun, learned a lot, and did great on the tests and grades(I did).
I had three main takeaways from this:
1.)The lectures were focused, dense, and did not take up the entire 90 minutes.
2.)We had plenty of time to practice the problems and help each other/get help during the period
3.)I now just recall that this was our lunch period as well, which we took the 2nd to last slot, so we had a break before the last bit of the period. This was quite nice.
As an aside, three of the coaches I had for academic classes are probably in my top 5 list. Their classes were very engaging.. I find this interesting.