Theda E. Armstrong, 96, a strong-willed teacher who taught in inner-city classrooms and specialized in tutoring hard-to-reach children for more than six decades, died Sunday, Oct. 15, of natural causes in her Wilmette home. “She liked the satisfaction she got when they were really terrible students who became good students,” said her granddaughter, Laurie Ballantini. “She liked the turnaround cases.” Mrs. Armstrong’s favorite students to tutor were those who were shy or couldn’t read. They would receive a stringent grounding in academic basics amid the books and notepaper stacked in Mrs. Armstrong’s kitchen, her granddaughter said. Equally stern in the classroom, Mrs. Armstrong spent 40 years in the Chicago Public Schools, her classroom authority and reputation apparently secured her first day, when inadvertent fidgeting with a lengthy pair of scissors seemingly intimidated her streetwise pupils into treating her with respect. “From that day forward, she was always talked about as tough,” her granddaughter said. Raised in Winnetka, the former Theda Ellison graduated from New Trier High School in 1921 and received a teaching certificate after a two-year college program on the North Shore. She soon went to work in the Chicago schools, continuing to work after her marriage in the 1920s to Ed Naylor. The union ended in divorce a decade later, though she remarried in the late 1940s to Stephen Armstrong, who died in 1969. After retiring from the Chicago schools in the 1960s, she continued tutoring for another 20 years out of her North Shore home, taking occasional vacation cruises through exotic ports around the world. In addition to her granddaughter, Mrs. Armstrong is survived by a daughter, Barbara Dodder; a grandson; three great-granddaughters; and a great-great-granddaughter. A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Friday in Winnetka Congregational Church, 725 Pine St.
