Week 5 Care Lab: History Mapping

Practising Week 4 — sorting your own human cat's history into recurring pattern, one-off event, shared convention and uncertain history

24 March 2027

Before your Care Lab#

Released Mon 15 Mar 2027 · due Wed 24 Mar 2027, 08:30, ahead of the earliest timetabled group.

Take material about your designated human cat — your Catwatch log and any notes you have added since — and sort it into Week 4’s four categories: recurring pattern, one-off event, shared convention, and uncertain history. Do not stop at the label. For each entry, write one sentence on what would go wrong if you filed it under a different category instead: what would a response built on “recurring pattern” assume that a one-off event does not support? What would a shared convention explain that would look presumptuous applied to a human cat you had just met?

In the Care Lab#

In your timetabled group, compare your sorting against your groupmates’, whether you are working from the same shared case or from your own logs. The useful disagreements are the borderline calls: something that has happened twice — is that a recurring pattern yet, or still uncertain? Trace what changes practically for your human cat if that call is wrong in either direction. Treating an emerging pattern as settled locks in a habit that has not actually stabilised; treating a real pattern as still uncertain means responding as though you are meeting them for the first time, again, every time.

Afterwards#

This sorting is not a warm-up exercise — it is the raw material The Care Model asks you to structure, and this week’s lecture is about what each of these categories deserves in terms of confidence and how long that confidence should last. Bring your four piles into both.