The authors, Angiline and Al, are university teacher educators who share similar experiences building community in middle grades mathematics classroom. As eighth grade mathematics teachers, they began the year building relationships with their students and encouraging communication to establish a caring ethic. In their mathematics classes, a caring community attitude was everything, and, as in any community, communication and relationships were paramount. In this article, they describe what a caring ethic looks like in a middle grades mathematics class, and they suggest specific practices drawn from their experiences that teachers can implement to make their classrooms more caring and engaging places. (Contains 5 figures.)