School - (15/8) squared?

Get a ruler in your hands. Measure things until you start to understand how a ruler works. Measure some stuff and figure out where the center is. Say you measure a book and it's 7/8" thick. You look at your ruler and see that every eighth is divided into two sixteenths, so obviously half of 7/8" is going to be 7/16". If you write that out you have 1/2 x 7/8 = 7/16. And you notice that 1/2 is divided into 2/4 and then into 4/8 and so on, so you can convert anything to anything by multiplying all the numbers on top and then all the numbers on bottom.

Other rulers are divided into 10 and 100 parts. But an inch is still an inch, so anything on one ruler can be translated to the other ruler. A half inch on one ruler is 5/10 or 50/100 on the other. An eighth inch is just 12.5 marks when you have 100 marks per inch. A metric ruler divides an inch into 25.4 parts, so a half inch would be 12.7 of those parts. Pretty simple, isn't it? Practice this a bit and people will think you went to wizard school.

School - (15/8) squared?

Use your ruler to draw a square 1/8" on a side. If you draw squares to fill up an inch there will be eight of them. Now if you draw rows of squares to make a square inch you will have 64 squares in all. 1/8" squared = 1/64 square inch. It is the square of the number on top and the square of the number on bottom.

Now here is a trick. Any time you have a number followed by 5, the square is that number times its follower and ending in 25. So you want the square of 15, that is 1 times 2 = 2 and 25 so you get 225. The square of 15/8 is 225/64.