Social Class

The Christian Science Monitor quiz gave me the result: Middling. The description is as follows: "Your habits and perspectives most resemble those of middle-class Americans. Members of this group tend to be gentle and engaging parents, and if they're native English speakers they probably use some regional idioms and inflections. Your people are mostly college-educated, and you're about equally likely to beg children not to shout "so loudly" as you are to ask them to "read slow" during story time. You're probably a decent judge of others' emotions, and either a non-evangelical Christian, an atheist, or an agnostic. A typical member of this group breastfeeds for three months or less, drinks diet soda, and visits the dentist regularly. If you're a member of this group, there's a good chance that you roll with the flow of technological progress and hate heavy metal music."
I agree with the results of this quiz. Almost all of the points that the quiz brought up about me were accurate. I have always considered my family to be middle class. Both of my parents make an average income and all of my family has been or will be college-educated. My brothers and I have also had access to a very good high school education. 
My experiences with class seem to be very different from the different texts that we've studied in class. My life is not filled with the glamour and swank of the characters in The Great Gatsby, but I do have privileges that many people, like the lower class family in People Like Us, don't have. I have never had to walk 10 and a half miles to get to work or school, and I have never felt embarrassment at my family's social class. This part of the documentary really opened my eyes to the problems facing people in the lower class in America. In reading the different texts, I have also learned how difficult it is to move up the economic ladder. Shadowy Lines That Still Divide shows how bad it really is. Mobility is incredibly low in America for the lower class, which means that the poor stay poor. And while this is true for the lower classes, in the upper classes, mobility is much easier. Ranks may open up in more elite positions, where only the well-connected members of the upper class know about them. This allows people with more money to move up the economic ladder further while people with less money are stuck at the bottom.