Tell me how fast you go and I will tell you how much you rotate

Many topics in modern physics are currently included in the curricula of the last year of high school in many countries, as for example in Italy. A consistent part of the curriculum should be devoted to the special theory of relativity. A particularly interesting phenomenon in this framework is the so-called Terrell-Penrose effect (TPE), which the students may find especially intriguing in view of its association with the name of one of the 2020 Nobel Prize winners. Although it is not possible to rigorously analyse this optical effect at the high school level, we show that is possible to tackle the topic anyway, during some of the in-depth lectures on modern physics that can be organized for high school students in our area. In particular, we found that this physical context can be useful for stimulating young students to use goniometric relations. Since trigonometry is a very important topic in mathematics, being always present in the written test for the final graduation exam, it is useful to show how it can be fruitfully used to tackle physical problems. The aim of this paper is to summarize our lecture on the TPE effect in the classroom, where we consider the case of a rod moving at high constant velocity, oriented with different angles with respect to the observer, and the case of a uniformly accelerated body (in the Newtonian approximation).