Academy Award winners Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey star with Haley Joel Osment as a struggling single mother, a social studies teacher whose placid life is in perfect order and the student whose class assignment has profound repercussions when, instead of paying it back, the recipient of a kindness must Pay It Forward. The assignment is simple: Look at the world around you and fix what you don't like. #1 It has to be something that really helps people #2 Something they can't do by themselves. #3 Do it for them, and they do it for three other people.But teacher Eugene Simonet (Spacey) never expects one his students to take the assignment to heart, much less the profound, unanticipated effects that Trevor McKinney's (Osment) actions will have on the world around him.