Charles Morton has been a close friend of mine for almost three decades. He’s also a super talented guy who plays bass in several Boston area bands, teaches organic chemistry at Brown University (he holds a PhD from MIT), coached men’s and women’s college volleyball and most importantly he is a father of four.

This is the first two-part edition of The Tight Five, as our conversation was so rich that I needed to release it in two parts! In Part I, we discuss how he’s leveraged coaching NCAA athletes as a father and a teacher. We also examine the point where science and math converge (hint: engineering). I’m excited to share Part II with you soon and I hope you ENJOY!!!

The Tight Five: Origin Stories from The Second Row is a series of conversations with smart, thought-provoking folks who are doing great things in ‘The Front Row’ of work, mental health, marketing, service and technology and how they came to their personal and professional path in life. The series is named after the moniker of the combined Front Row (two props and the hooker in the middle) and the Second Row in the rugby scrum.

Matt Landry:

Alright, here we go. Welcome to the Tight 5 with Mr. Charles or Doctor Charles Morton

Charles Morton:

Thanks for having me, man.

Matt:

Let's just dive into it as we usually do. You were volleyball coach back in the day and now you are an Under 10 soccer coach…

Charles:

For a very long time. 18 years, less so for the youth soccer crew…

Matt:

How do you use some of those volleyball coaching techniques as a parent and as a college teacher?

Charles:

So, the parent and teacher part of this is very different. Right. My kids right now are 11, 9, 7, and 5 and they don't realize they're on the same team. As a coach of a team sport you have people who play different positions and have different responsibilities. You have to motivate them and train them to take care of their job. For the good of the team they have different responsibilities, and they have to work toward those different goals, so you have to create an environment in which people recognize each other's contributions.

If it's a volleyball team, you have a hitter who recognizes a teammate who provides great defense, right? If it’s a soccer team, you have a striker who recognizes the goalie making an awesome save. So, as a coach your job is to create an environment where people recognize each other's contributions and realize that everyone's got different jobs.

Matt:

They literally have numbers and positions defined.

Charles:

Then there are the things that don't show up on a stat sheet that people can still get a positive reward for and feel good about themselves.

Matt:

Not to mention like a win as a team. As a collective team, right?

Charles:

Winning is fun. But the amount of time you spend in competition compared to the amount of time you spend with the people you're coaching is tiny. So how do you how do you win the time that you're spending with these people?

But parenting is not a competition, right? So, the neat thing about trying to apply coaching to parenting is that siblings don't quite get this. Siblings are really into fairness and equality, which they naturally gravitate toward.

So, you divide up the chores. People want to do certain things. They don't want to do other things, but the team reward of “you're going to be able to turn on the TV and watch cartoons” or whatever, if everybody gets their cleaning jobs done. That works pretty well on paper, but then in practice…

For example, let’s look at the entryway. Shoes everywhere, soccer stuff everywhere, socks everywhere, school crap everywhere, there's crap everywhere and the person assigned to clean up that space will more often than not go to that space, clean up their stuff and they’ll say ‘I put my shoes away. I put my backpack away,’ and they feel like they did their job.

Matt:

Hard to see the win in cleaning.

Charles:

Right. It's like, well, because if you don't, I'm not going to let you turn TV on. Which is very carrot and stick, which is not how you're supposed to get things done, but practically that's how things get done. Again, we’re talking about 11, 9, 7 and 5 years old and you're not expecting the 5 year old to accomplish much in the cleaning. You hopefully allocate responsibilities in a way that they can execute, but then you'll get resentment from the 7 year old who will do a disproportionate amount of the cleaning and then have to wait on the collective reward because somebody else has been half-assing their job. It's just annoying.

So, when you're coaching a team and it's obvious that everybody's there to move the team forward and you create an environment where different people have different responsibilities that everybody buys into. You put your own fairness aside in terms of what kind of credit you're going to get for whatever.

If everybody does their jobs well, we're going to have a lot of success as a team. It's harder to create that vibe when it comes to parenting. Because you're also simultaneously trying to really develop these little individuals, you're trying to develop their sense of fairness and responsibility.

Matt:

What are some of the lessons of volleyball coaching that you use as a teacher?

Charles:

It's much easier to translate the coaching techniques to college teaching or high school teaching, any kind of teaching at a level where there's something like… ‘Hey, there's going to be a test in this class at some point.’

So, students are put in positions where they're going to cram for tests, because it's harder for college students to manage a day to day routine, the way that an athlete is forced to by daily practice or artist like a musician in an orchestra or an actor in a in a play. There's daily practice. There's a daily rehearsal. You go over it for a couple of hours every day. When the performance comes around, or when the competition comes around, it's just the thing you've been doing every day.

If you’re a college student… we've all done this, right? Every one of us has done this. There is a test on Thursday morning, but it's not till Thursday. So, the weekend before, we fucked off and did other things. On Monday and Tuesday there was some other stuff we had to turn in and all of a sudden, it’s Wednesday afternoon and you’re like, ‘oh shit, I got that test tomorrow morning!’

So, what do you do? You go nuts. You go full bullshit mode into all of your textbooks, all your notes, all the stuff that you should have been doing a little bit each day, all along. And of course, you're up ‘til 3 in the morning, you know you're not working efficiently, you go in and take the test and you're going to suck. You're not going to do your best.

Matt:

Just from the caffeine come down!

Charles:

You're not going to do your best work. I tell my students to "treat this class as if you were an athlete. If you’ve got a game on Saturday, would you not pick up a ball all week and then on Friday night you say to yourself, oh shit, I have a game tomorrow, then go play all night and then expect to play well in the game? Of course not! If you were playing violin in the orchestra and you have a concert Saturday night you wouldn't say, ‘I'm not going to touch my violin all week!’ and then on Saturday morning, say ‘I'm going to play all day and then I'll be ready to go’. It's not going to happen, right? You're going to suck.

It's a performance and you should have been rehearsing for it all along so that nothing surprises you. I've already been doing this stuff, so it’s no big deal. You know that it takes five weeks’ worth of work leading up to a test, which translates into maybe an hour a day of organic chemistry—and then you don’t have to study at all for the test because you just do this for an hour day anyway and there's no there's no drama in it. You're going to spend the same number of hours. You're just spending them in a way that an athlete or an artist would do it, not in the 20 hours leading up to the exam without any sleep and with a lot of caffeine.

Matt:

There's a rhythm to it too.

Charles:

There's a rhythm to it because you're managing your time, you're managing your nutrition, you're managing your rest. You look at your class schedule and you say to yourself, ‘All right, that hour between classes in the middle of the day on Tuesday from like 1 pm to 2 pm, I’m not going to just fuck off during that time. I'm going to go check in office hours or I'm going to bang out some reading for lecture tomorrow or I'm going to turn that time into something that has to get done during that time because the hour doesn't exist later in the day. I'm in the gym from 4:30 to 7:30 or whatever and then I have to eat and I have to shower and I then I’ve got to go to bed.’

Matt:

You mentioned you tutored in math and engineering and all kinds of sciences. From a person who's more of a from the arts, the English. History political science type of side of things like myself, a word guy, if you will. I've always been kind of curious about where math and science converge. I mean, I know they're very much hand in hand with each other, but they're different disciplines.

Charles:

More than hand in hand. Sometimes fist and face.

So, I'm going to add engineering to it.

Math is a set of tools, and they are tools that exist to help you identify and describe patterns. And a lot of math is just absolutely beautiful because of the patterns, it’s how we uncover the relationships between numbers and functions and the procedures for describing computational ideas, geometric ideas, topological ideas. It's really just gorgeous stuff. But they are pure tools that don't necessarily even need a context from the physical world. The idea of numbers and functions as a pure form as an abstract thing, which is great because you can just explore the space of how numbers relate to each other.

So, math explores all the possible patterns and relationships, which enables you to develop all these cool tools and it's great.

Matt:

It's endless.

Charles:

Completely infinite.

What science does is it says, ‘Okay. We live in a universe and—like it or not—there are rules governing the behavior of things in the universe from the macro scale of galaxies and down to the nano scale of subatomic particles and we as scientists want to understand what's going on in the natural world.’

Scientists design experiments to ask questions about what's going on in the natural world and math is necessarily required to analyze the results. You develop an experiment to measure some phenomenon and then you see if the results of your measurements and any of the patterns that the math world says exists. And if you see those patterns… great!

So, there's your math and science nexus. Math is context-independent discovery of patterns and relationships. Science adds context from the physical world. That said, of course a lot of inspiration for discovery of math is motivated by some scientific inquiry.

Matt:

Okay. So, what's engineering?

Charles:

Engineers come in when the scientists say, ‘I have this interesting question and I don't have the tools to study it.’ The engineer says to the scientist, ‘Hold my beer.’ You seem to want to take these kinds of measurements, so this kind of system or device operates under these parameters.’

Engineers design, their job is to design the equipment and I don't necessarily mean hardware, it could be software, it could be…

Matt:

Could be a combination.

Charles:

It could be anything that would fall under whatever design means to you, that's what an engineer comes in and does. In order to enable either scientific inquiry that wasn't previously possible or some kind of application for which existing tools aren't good enough.

So, the back and forth between science and engineering is to answer some kind of question. The tools that are available might not be sufficient. An engineer comes in and makes new tools and the goal for the engineer is not just to enable that type of scientific discovery, it's to have those tools persist. So, if you did a good job with your engineering, it’s because you made a new set of tools that could be used for new instances of scientific questions beyond the one for which it was originally designed.

Matt:

Yeah, a framework, as you explained before.

Charles:

A scientist can probably come up with a one-off tool, a one-off variation on an existing experiment to do something. An engineer’s goal is really to make kind of a something that's a little bit more platform than single use.