The COVID-19 pandemic restrictions presented teachers, students, and parents with unique challenges that were met with varying degrees of creativity, flexibility, and stamina and were dependent upon specific contexts and available resources. This work utilized interviews to examine charter school secondary science teachers' online teaching in response to COVID-19 restrictions. Specifically, this study explored teachers' instructional approaches, teaching constraints, and teacher stressors with a semi-structured interview within a community of inquiry framework. In addition, there were significant challenges to providing remote instruction due to technology constraints involving hardware, software, and Internet connectivity. Moreover, teachers were ill-prepared for online teaching due to the lack of training, professional development courses, guidance, and communication among peers. Although many of the teachers in the study suffered emotionally and physically, they were generally creative and resilient as they struggled to develop novel pedagogical resources that could be applied to the online setting. The findings suggest that greater planning, training, hardware and software infrastructure preparation, guidance on instruction formats or standardization, peer support systems, and communication could enhance teachers' capacity and skills for online teaching.