A lifetime of playing, learning, teaching and sharing music has been the life’s work of piano teacher Shelia Hess.

She has played the piano ever since she was 7 years old, and she started teaching others by the time she was 15 in her hometown of Mobile, Ala.

“It’s a lifetime,” Hess said, adding it’s been her main interest over the years.

The opportunity to teach private lessons at the Conservatory of the Fine Arts came seven years ago, and she appreciates working in a place that she said, “emphasizes the outreach of the arts in the community.”

“It’s a great place to teach,” she said. “My colleagues and I work really well together. It’s a really great family of friends and musicians.”

Hess teaches children and adults in 30- to 45-minute lessons. A good age to start playing, she said, is around third grade, and she uses method books to teach students beginning skills.

“It’s a program where they learn to play the skills of piano in an organized fashion. It’s not hit and miss. It’s organized at their level,” she said.

Her best advice for students is to play consistently, and she urges all of her students to have a piano or keyboard at home to use to prepare for each lesson.

“The key to it is practice,” she said.

She typically see’s her students once a week, and lessons often follow the same calendar as the school year even though she still teaches a few students throughout the summer.

By teaching piano, Hess said she feels like she is giving the students a gift they will have forever.

“Even if they quit, they’ve learned something, and they’ve developed,” she said.

Hess enjoys seeing the growth within her students from year to year and how proud they are of themselves as they advance in their musical understanding. Taking an active role with each student is important to her and she likes to have a relationship with each student and parent.

“I think that’s one of the greatest gifts you can give as an educator is to show interest in your pupil,” she said. “If you’re lucky enough you have them in the third grade and you continue to teach them through high school.”

The conservatory holds a recital at the end of the school year for the students to display the music they have prepared and she skills they have learned all year.

“The goal is to teach the people to be able to read music, to preform music, to understand music, to share music, to love music,” she said.

Hess also plays organ and has been studying with a retired organ teacher at Mississippi College for 20 years.

“I learn something new every lesson,” she said.

She will have a 20-minute recital for the MacDowell Music Club in Jackson coming up in October. Hess also often plays for churches in the Vicksburg and Jackson areas.