Know Your Cat

The capstone — keep your care model honest under contradiction, failure and change for the rest of the semester

Due: Fri, 28 May 2027, 12:00 · Weight: 50%

Your fieldwork

Live with the consequences of your own model — keep it honest as your human cat contradicts it, breaks it, and changes.

Catwatch asked you to observe. The Care Model asked you to structure what you observed into something revisable. Know Your Cat asks the hardest thing: keep using that model, in real time, as your human cat meets it with contradiction, change, and the occasional flat refusal to be predictable — and show your working when it does.

Released Wed 21 Apr 2027, 09:00, immediately after The Care Model closes. Know Your Cat runs through the rest of the semester, with the Week 12 Care Lab serving as the final capstone clinic.

A useful principle for the whole exercise:

The cat is always bigger than the model you have of them.

What you hand in

Your evolving care model — the same one from The Care Model, carried forward and visibly changed, not restarted — together with:

  1. your current understanding of your human cat;
  2. the memory strategy you have settled on: what you keep, what you hold lightly, and what you let expire;
  3. at least one genuinely difficult interaction case;
  4. at least one documented failure — a moment your model got your human cat wrong;
  5. the repair that followed it;
  6. how the model itself changed afterward, not only the response;
  7. a short reflection on what you now know about this human cat that could not have been known in Week 1.

Where this comes from

This is not a fresh brief. It is the direct continuation of The Care Model, asked to survive contact with a semester’s worth of change.

What good work shows

You are not marked on presenting a flawless relationship. A submission with no visible failure in it is usually one that stopped looking, not one that got everything right. A real failure, honestly diagnosed and repaired, is worth more here than a clean record you cannot fully account for.

How it is marked

Know Your Cat is judged as a whole against how convincingly it demonstrates sustained, personalised care rather than a single well-executed response — whether contradictions between signals are weighed rather than ignored, whether at least one real failure is diagnosed and repaired rather than smoothed over, and whether the model behind it has visibly changed since Week 7 rather than staying the profile it started as.