For several hours each week, this large art room at Hazen High School becomes a beehive of activity. Students buzz through the airy space, pounding, cutting, heating and bending pieces of metal. Scraps of metal, wood and wire litter the room’s tables. Machines hum, mallets pound and the whole place smells like a metal factory.

And it is.

“I think about something somebody once said to me,” says Gary Grossman. “We’re making jewelry here, but sometimes I feel like I’m half artist and half construction worker.”

If the students are bees, Grossman is queen. He teaches jewelry manufacturing at Hazen. Before coming to Hazen eight years ago, Grossman taught jewelry at Renton High School and Renton Technical College and several other studios and schools in his native Pennsylvania. He has a degree in industrial design and once had his own line of jewelry.

Grossman was the one to first liken his class to a beehive. He calls the class totally different from the rest of the school.

“…this bustle of energy and work… it’s just cool. I love being a part of it,” he says during a recent class.

He flits from student to student, helping them transform hunks of metal into rings.

“You did a good job,” he says to senior Robin Lee, while holding her dainty circle of metal. The next step, he says, is to carefully remove the ring’s stone, with a knife.

“I was actually kind of amazed,” Lee says of how her ring has turned out so far.

It’s Lee’s first time taking jewelry manufacturing.

“I really like it,” she says.

Senior Scott Greivell likes the class so much that he takes it two periods a day.

“At first I was kind of hesitant to take it,” Greivell admits. “I’ve been taking woodshop my whole high school career. But my friend said, ‘Hey, take this class.’ So I took it, and I love it now.”

He loves Grossman’s class enough to sneak out of woodshop for it — with the woodshop teacher’s permission, of course.

He plans to use his metal skills to work on airplanes for the Coast Guard.

Like the rest of the class, Greivell is making a ring. But not any ring. A huge, honker of a ring flashing with LED lights.

This piece of jewelry isn’t for wearing. It’s for an upcoming state competition — the 2009 Passing the Torch Seattle Metals Guild Washington Statewide High School Jewelry/Metals Exhibition.

Greivell is one of Grossman’s five students likely to submit a piece to the show, April 14-May 8 at North Seattle Community College.

It’s Greivell’s first time submitting a piece to the show. He’s been working on his ring since January, and hopes to have it finished in time for Saturday’s deadline.

“Grossman said, ‘Don’t make a ring that’s practical, just make it look good,’” Greivell says.

As the teacher of several past first-place finishers, Grossman is confident his current team of students will show well at the state competition.

“We’ll definitely have some winners — if they finish their pieces,” he says. “The ideas are there, it’s just a matter of bringing them to fruition and demonstrating their technical superiority over the other ones.”

Hazen’s biggest competition in the state show is Auburn Riverside High School. Most Auburn high schools have jewelry programs, but Hazen is the only Renton school in the district to offer the class.

Grossman expects 50 to 80 entries this year. Those entries will be in two categories: jewelry and sculpture. Three top prizes and three honorable mentions will be awarded in each category. Prizes include hundreds of dollars in tools and metal courses.

Grossman is excited about the upcoming contest. But his classes are about much more than competing, or even jewelry.

“It’s not so much about jewelry and metalworks, but the understanding of technical skills and how it relates to everything else,” he says.

Everything he teaches is applicable to something besides jewelry.

“Someone could fix their own pipes, make hinges for their doors,” he says. “We’ve made keys, we fix different things. I don’t like to think of it as just jewelry manufacturing.”

Many of his past students now have their own jewelry lines, but others have taken their metal skills into other realms.

One of his former students builds prosthetic limbs at the University of Washington. She recently showed Grossman her first arm, made of metal, foam, gears and plastic.

“It was really beautiful,” Grossman says. “It was big jewelry. A medical accessory. That’s the kind of connection that I hope people will make. That it’s not just adornment. It’s serious stuff that will help people.”

Grossman’s students work on that serious (and not so serious) stuff while they buzz through his class hammering and bending their jewelry.

“Sometimes I just have to sit back and look at the class,” Grossman says. “Everyone is busily doing all these functions, these techniques that I taught them, and it just blows me away.”