Classroom Update and H.S.

This past week in class, I spent the majority of my time trying to teach the metric system to my students. Now, while I consider myself to be pretty proficient in teaching math to 7th and 8th graders, I've got to say that I really struggled this past week in finding a way to help my students understand metric system conversions. I even gave a test this past week, and I had my lowest test scores of the year on this; I'm talking like 35-40% correct answers. I did a crash course teaching session covering the test they just took from top to bottom as well as a couple of other worksheets that I made in hopes that they would understand it a little bit better for the retake. I even called as many parents as I could asking them to make sure to go over the review sheets with their child in preparation for the test retake. Well, we had the retake today and I just got finished grading. This time there was probably a 60% average for my classes. While this is a slight improvement this is still not passing!! I hate getting frustrated, but it almost seems like for this particular objective I need to be able to call each one of my students out of other teachers' classes during my planning period and go over material with them either individually or in pairs. The only problem is that this would take forever.....or as Squints from The Sandlot would say, "FOR....E...VER.....FOR....E....VER....FOR....E....VER."
The other problem that comes up is that I am already behind now for teaching the remaining objectives for this nine weeks, and we already had a meeting over how badly our school did on this past nine weeks test. This job is hard....haha.
One cool thing that has kind of rejuvenated my spirits a little bit was this past week I was hired by one of the local high schools to serve as an assistant baseball coach. Now, I was originally just supposed to step in and either coach track or tennis on the middle school level, but once the head coach talked to me about possibly doing it I was hooked. I have always loved baseball; in fact, next to basketball it is my favorite sport.
Plus, one thing that has really got me excited is the chance to work on the high school varsity level. The maturity difference between a high school junior or senior and a 7th or 8th grader is ridiculous. The kids I am working with right now are like sponges; they are constantly asking for more advice or tips to help them be better ball players. Now don't get me wrong, I love working with middle school kids. It is just a really nice break to be able to coach and teach someone who is extremely self-motivated and self-disciplined.
The only concern is that I wonder how much of a time investment this is going to be. Middle school was always so nice in that you were always going home no later than 6:30 pm, and you never had games or tournaments on the weekends. This is a whole different ballgame. Ah, Doyle, Gallagher, and Conley do it....how hard can it be?